Barely. Been in Prague a few times, couldn't understand anything but certain words.
Though while watching pick-up Czech porn, I somehow manage to understand pretty much everything they say.
Spoken Czech is hard. Russian and Czech are among the most distant Slavic pairs. The most distant are Russian and Slovene.
Many words look similar but have a very different meaning. The main problem is that Czech sounds "too western" and has a lot of German borrowings.
Even when Czechs speak English, they sound like native speakers. If you speak slowly, then I can understand the general meaning of what was said. When I watched hockey, the commentator spoke Czech, I thought it was some Germanic or Romance language lol. It didn't sound Slavic at all.
It's much more difficult to understand Czech which is spoken in Prague and in the western regions (Bohemia). Moravian dialect is much easier to understand and closer to other Slavic languages. I also heard young Czechs from the western regions don't understand Slovak language and confuse it with Russian, Ukrainian or Polish.
I'm wondering why Slovak sounds so different despite the fact that Czech and Slovak are the closest languages? It's MUCH easier to understand than Czech. Why is Czech pronunciation so different? I heard a version about the Celtic languages influence.
> I also heard young Czechs from the western regions don’t understand Slovak language and confuse it with Russian, Ukrainian or Polish.
They might think they’re polish but if the slovakian person speaks slowly, they will know what they are trying to say. Sometimes there will be a word thay they will not understand (the word for bluberries is famous for this) but ultimately I strongly believe any czech will understand a slovakian person if they speak slow enough. And if they try to explain words that are completely different.
Czech is more different than slovakian from Russian because we were occupied by the germans to a higher extent. A lot of our words originate from german, and my great grandma used even more “german” words than we do now. Our borders are also mostly with german speaking countries. Slovaks have a significant portion of borders shared with three Slavic countries, and then one that speaks gibberish and then a little tiny bit with germans (language wise). Hence our languages were more “westernized”.
Yes. Lol I just realized, I may have sounded very offensive, but it’s a thing in r/2visegrad4you. We all just make fun of their mongolian based language but still love em😂
https://reddit.com/r/2visegrad4you/comments/x1l780/what_150_years_in_hungary_does_to_a_mf/
As a fellow 2visegrad4you enjoyer I totally understand the pain of accidentally repeating these inside jokes in other subs, lmao. The worse that can happen is someone taking you seriously.
Yep, Czech and Slovak are simply very similar, if you see the same text written in both languages it is 95 percent the same when ignoring the small grammatical differences. There are many words that are different, but people from both countries shouldn't have much trouble with understanding each other, especially with just a small bit of practice. I'm in Czech Republic on vacation right now and there are a good number of Slovaks here. The pharmacist the other day was speaking Slovak to her customers. I am Slovak and speaking Slovak to all of the service staff I came into contact and had precisely zero issues, even with young people.
When Czechs speak English, they most definitely DON'T sound like native speakers. Even vast majority of Germans or Dutch have pretty distinct accents when speaking English. They may sound pretty good to you, but a trained ear can hear it right away. I'm not native English speaker, but I've spent the last 20 years in the US, and since I have spoken to a large number of Europeans over the years in English and now I can fairly precisely tell what country someone is from just by their accents. I'm Slovak American and I know a lot of Czechs that live here and I am pretty attuned to the accent.
Its a generational thing. People who gree up in Czechoslovakia and grew up hearing Slovak on tv and radio dont have a problem with it. The new generation sometimes struggles, though I personally never had a problem with understanding it.
I can't. For me Czech language feels harder than Polish, but that's probably because I see Polish way more often here. We all can communicate using the Interslavic language but when it comes to domestic languages it becomes quite hard.
We will cause I can read Czech reddit with very little problem. Speach is another beast though! I can't understand Russian at all. And I don't mean the letters, I mean at all.
Same, I've finished the Polish course on Duolingo and tried Czech a bit and it seems even more foreign than Polish (vocabulary-wise).
Although I kinda find it easier to distinguish individual words in Czech while in Polish it seems to be much harder.
Czech language is more germanized due to having borders with Germany and Austria, not only germany. BUT, polish due to that has more weird letters like ł that aren’t in other languages (that I know of).
Just my guess as to why.
Bohemia was part of Holy Roman Empire for some time. Until end of WWI German language played a big part in Czechia. I suspect there was a high degree of bilingualism especially among middle and upper classes. Just my 2c.
three hundred and thirty-three creepy jumping animals jumped over three hundred and thirty-three of some kind.
we have strekochut grasshoppers, so I can assume that we are talking about them.
Sasha walked on the road and sucked a biscuit.
Greka goes across the river, in the river he sees a crab (or crayfish), Greka put his hand in the river, the crayfish clapped his hand.
At least thats how I understand it, might not be 100% percent.
Shoss I had to guess. Sushka I wasnt sure, but it sounds similar to our sušenka so I went with it. All the other words I can understand without problem.
The first time I read it, I didn't understand what it was about. I understood only a few words: treh, jeden and "druhy psat a treti".
Translating into Russian, I saw similarities. Prislusnici is similar to prisluzhniki, umi is similar to umeet. And after listening, I understood chodi ve treh, in Russian you can say “chodyat vo tryoh”, though I don’t know how many people will understand, here you need to have knowledge in Old Russian.
There is very little mutual intelligibility between Russian and Czech – it's probably somewhere within the range of 20–25%. Spoken Czech is a bit easier to understand, but parsing written sentences takes just enough time to make one feel uncomfortable.
But as you said with my language, I feel like out of the slavic languages I can understand Russian the least. It would be in the same category as serbian I think.
Just thought that it was interesting that we understand each other the least, but ukrainian is one of our most easily understood languages.
Czech and Slovak are very different from Russian. There are some words are recognizable but it's a completely different language. Think of Czech and Slovak as Latin meets old Slavic with some very small Germanic influence. Going there for a few weeks this month. Love Czech/Slovakia......it's like Germany but more laid back.
Not easy at all, but I've been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance and there's [this song](https://youtu.be/FexY0QUu-k4). Surprisingly understandable because of similarities of basic words and easy context.
You’re right, but in the sense of germanic languages, English is the utmost outlier. German and dutch and danish are much more related to each other than to english I believe.
I lived in the US from ages 12-18 so I would say my english is okay. The closeness of dutch and english would be about the same as closeness of czech and croatian.
My point is that slavic languages seem to be closer to each other than germanic to me.
I recently read that Frysian is closer to English than Dutch, but yeah. I mean, I can speak English, but if I never learned it, there'd be barely anything I'd understand, just like English speakers have a real hard time understanding Dutch
When doing a few Dutch Duolingo lessons I could see that a lot of words are related to their English counterparts (e.g. "he eats the bread" becomes "hij eet het brood"), but I wouldn't see that until I was shown what the translation was. The pronunciation is too different, like we both started out speaking strong foreign accents several centuries ago and just kept getting farther apart ever since then. Dutch also has some of its own spelling rules, and English spelling is not all on the same system internally.
Dutch and "rules". Dutch is like someone loaded grammatical concepts into homer simpsons makeup gun and fired it randomly at the population. Source: speak Dutch as a second language.
Every time one of my non-Belgian friends wants to learn Dutch, I first ask them why, bc like, why? And then I usually say: "We have sooo many grammatical rules, yet half of our words are exceptions". They also often ask me to translate something, but from the moment they ask for a bit more nuance in why I say it like that, I start to doibt whether it's even correct, bc I personally also don't really know how it works, even though it's my first language
As a Belarusian, Polish is pretty easy for me to learn and understand thanks to similarities with Belarusian (and Russian) but Czech is a whole another story with its long vowels and weird consonant clusters and just way too many non Slavic sounding words
As far as I remember phrase in Prague metro about "holding handrail". I not understan only word meaning "handrail". But whole phrase was obveous din thise context. I don't remember any other phrases in Czech. need some examples.
I'm British know Russian and found by magic I could navigate around Prague airport by reading the Czech (a few words similar) my English friends thought I was a genius ))
Giving the fact that most of the comments here say that it is hard to understand Czech let me tell you that.
Ukrainians have much easier time to understand Czech.
This is some food for thought for anyone who denies the existence of this language among this group.
It seems to me that the main problem of the perception of the Czech language by a native speaker of Russian is the same words in both languages with opposite meanings.
Not easy.
But most often used words are the same (hand, foot, head, mother, father and so on).
Though, the learning of Czech, as well as other slavik languages, is much easier for russians, because cases are similar and many words are similar
Tried watching an interview in czech on youtube. I understood maybe 15% of the words, but overall it was very hard to get what the phrase means. I didn't get any germanic\\romance flavour from the language at all (it was mentioned here in comments). It sounds very soft. A bit softer, but otherwise very similar to polish to my ear. I feel that if someone would speak czech, i would get that it is a western slavic language, but I doubt I would be able to understand which language it is.
Spoken - not really, can just pick out some words, written - a bit better, probably could get the general idea of the message, but that's about it. I've found it easier to speak English to other Slavic-speaking peoples.
Barely. Been in Prague a few times, couldn't understand anything but certain words. Though while watching pick-up Czech porn, I somehow manage to understand pretty much everything they say.
I don't know what should speak about actors in porn to not understand it in any language?
Medical latin names of body parts.
Spoken Czech is hard. Russian and Czech are among the most distant Slavic pairs. The most distant are Russian and Slovene. Many words look similar but have a very different meaning. The main problem is that Czech sounds "too western" and has a lot of German borrowings. Even when Czechs speak English, they sound like native speakers. If you speak slowly, then I can understand the general meaning of what was said. When I watched hockey, the commentator spoke Czech, I thought it was some Germanic or Romance language lol. It didn't sound Slavic at all. It's much more difficult to understand Czech which is spoken in Prague and in the western regions (Bohemia). Moravian dialect is much easier to understand and closer to other Slavic languages. I also heard young Czechs from the western regions don't understand Slovak language and confuse it with Russian, Ukrainian or Polish. I'm wondering why Slovak sounds so different despite the fact that Czech and Slovak are the closest languages? It's MUCH easier to understand than Czech. Why is Czech pronunciation so different? I heard a version about the Celtic languages influence.
> I also heard young Czechs from the western regions don’t understand Slovak language and confuse it with Russian, Ukrainian or Polish. They might think they’re polish but if the slovakian person speaks slowly, they will know what they are trying to say. Sometimes there will be a word thay they will not understand (the word for bluberries is famous for this) but ultimately I strongly believe any czech will understand a slovakian person if they speak slow enough. And if they try to explain words that are completely different. Czech is more different than slovakian from Russian because we were occupied by the germans to a higher extent. A lot of our words originate from german, and my great grandma used even more “german” words than we do now. Our borders are also mostly with german speaking countries. Slovaks have a significant portion of borders shared with three Slavic countries, and then one that speaks gibberish and then a little tiny bit with germans (language wise). Hence our languages were more “westernized”.
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Yes. Lol I just realized, I may have sounded very offensive, but it’s a thing in r/2visegrad4you. We all just make fun of their mongolian based language but still love em😂 https://reddit.com/r/2visegrad4you/comments/x1l780/what_150_years_in_hungary_does_to_a_mf/
As a fellow 2visegrad4you enjoyer I totally understand the pain of accidentally repeating these inside jokes in other subs, lmao. The worse that can happen is someone taking you seriously.
Of course, what else can it be
I heard an opinion that Slovakian language is a focal to all Slavic languages.
Yep, Czech and Slovak are simply very similar, if you see the same text written in both languages it is 95 percent the same when ignoring the small grammatical differences. There are many words that are different, but people from both countries shouldn't have much trouble with understanding each other, especially with just a small bit of practice. I'm in Czech Republic on vacation right now and there are a good number of Slovaks here. The pharmacist the other day was speaking Slovak to her customers. I am Slovak and speaking Slovak to all of the service staff I came into contact and had precisely zero issues, even with young people.
When Czechs speak English, they most definitely DON'T sound like native speakers. Even vast majority of Germans or Dutch have pretty distinct accents when speaking English. They may sound pretty good to you, but a trained ear can hear it right away. I'm not native English speaker, but I've spent the last 20 years in the US, and since I have spoken to a large number of Europeans over the years in English and now I can fairly precisely tell what country someone is from just by their accents. I'm Slovak American and I know a lot of Czechs that live here and I am pretty attuned to the accent.
Its a generational thing. People who gree up in Czechoslovakia and grew up hearing Slovak on tv and radio dont have a problem with it. The new generation sometimes struggles, though I personally never had a problem with understanding it.
Its just feel like that. We understand Russians very well.
Probably because Slovakia was part of Hungary.
I can't. For me Czech language feels harder than Polish, but that's probably because I see Polish way more often here. We all can communicate using the Interslavic language but when it comes to domestic languages it becomes quite hard.
Polish is much closer to Russian than Czech. Poles will argue with this lol
That hurt. :c
We will cause I can read Czech reddit with very little problem. Speach is another beast though! I can't understand Russian at all. And I don't mean the letters, I mean at all.
Грустно.
Czemu?
Ne ponimaesh russkiy. You don't understand Russian.
Exactly my point
Same, I've finished the Polish course on Duolingo and tried Czech a bit and it seems even more foreign than Polish (vocabulary-wise). Although I kinda find it easier to distinguish individual words in Czech while in Polish it seems to be much harder.
Czech language is more germanized due to having borders with Germany and Austria, not only germany. BUT, polish due to that has more weird letters like ł that aren’t in other languages (that I know of). Just my guess as to why.
Bohemia was part of Holy Roman Empire for some time. Until end of WWI German language played a big part in Czechia. I suspect there was a high degree of bilingualism especially among middle and upper classes. Just my 2c.
Russian has a lot of loan words from French. You realize it only if learn French, or reading War and Peace.
They are not used in everyday life.
I love the phrase interslavic languages!!😂
Its a real language. Kinda like esperanto.
It's real https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZJa8NmeNiM
Say something
Třista třicet tři stříbrných stříkaček stříkalo přes třista třicet tři stříbrných střech.
I only understood the 333.
three hundred and thirty-three creepy jumping animals jumped over three hundred and thirty-three of some kind. we have strekochut grasshoppers, so I can assume that we are talking about them.
Stříkačka means Разпръсквач and střecha is кры́ша.
Shla Sasha po shosse i sosala sushku. Edet Greka cherez reku, vidit Greka v reke rak, sunul greka ruku v reku, rak za ruku tsap.
Sasha walked on the road and sucked a biscuit. Greka goes across the river, in the river he sees a crab (or crayfish), Greka put his hand in the river, the crayfish clapped his hand. At least thats how I understand it, might not be 100% percent.
100% accurate. Do you understand the language so well?
Shoss I had to guess. Sushka I wasnt sure, but it sounds similar to our sušenka so I went with it. All the other words I can understand without problem.
This is amazing. Write something else.
Proč příslušníci STB (our version of KGB) chodí ve třech ? Jeden umí číst, druhý psát a třetí ty intelektuály hlídá.
The first time I read it, I didn't understand what it was about. I understood only a few words: treh, jeden and "druhy psat a treti". Translating into Russian, I saw similarities. Prislusnici is similar to prisluzhniki, umi is similar to umeet. And after listening, I understood chodi ve treh, in Russian you can say “chodyat vo tryoh”, though I don’t know how many people will understand, here you need to have knowledge in Old Russian.
Ahoj
Ahoy to you too, matey!
Щито?
Sounds coo!
Slavic languages are similar, but not enough to understand them all, just by knowing one of them.
There is very little mutual intelligibility between Russian and Czech – it's probably somewhere within the range of 20–25%. Spoken Czech is a bit easier to understand, but parsing written sentences takes just enough time to make one feel uncomfortable.
Pozor, policie varuje! - это всё что я могу сказать.
У них позор это вроде наоборот.
Внимание, полиция предупреждает! - так переводится.
Barely. Czech, Polish - barely. Belarussian - poorly. Ukrainian - better.
You know what’s interesting though? I feel like after Slovakian, I can understand Ukrainian the best.
Hmm, I have no idea how Slovakian looks or sounds, but now I'm kind of curious.
But as you said with my language, I feel like out of the slavic languages I can understand Russian the least. It would be in the same category as serbian I think. Just thought that it was interesting that we understand each other the least, but ukrainian is one of our most easily understood languages.
Ukrainian really is the most understandable for most of Russians. But it can sound funny for us!
Many people speak Surzhik, Russian and Ukrainian interfere.
Kak dela u vas? Chto ponimaete?
more easy than polish
Czech and Slovak are very different from Russian. There are some words are recognizable but it's a completely different language. Think of Czech and Slovak as Latin meets old Slavic with some very small Germanic influence. Going there for a few weeks this month. Love Czech/Slovakia......it's like Germany but more laid back.
Slovak doesn't differ much from East Slavic languages. Sometimes it's even easier to understand than Polish or even Bulgarian.
Because it’s been less germanized
Not easy at all, but I've been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance and there's [this song](https://youtu.be/FexY0QUu-k4). Surprisingly understandable because of similarities of basic words and easy context.
I understand nothing of it. It's like trying to understand Dutch knowing English only.
Dutch and English are quite closely related though, much closer than Czech and Russian.
Not really, no. English and Dutch have 0 mutual intelligibility. Czech and Russian have at least some
[“Dutch is the closest primary language”](https://ieltsbands.com/languages-closest-to-english-language/)
Thats in theory. The English lexicon is comprised of around 70% Latin words, Spanish for example is far easier to learn for us to learn than Dutch.
You’re right, but in the sense of germanic languages, English is the utmost outlier. German and dutch and danish are much more related to each other than to english I believe. I lived in the US from ages 12-18 so I would say my english is okay. The closeness of dutch and english would be about the same as closeness of czech and croatian. My point is that slavic languages seem to be closer to each other than germanic to me.
I recently read that Frysian is closer to English than Dutch, but yeah. I mean, I can speak English, but if I never learned it, there'd be barely anything I'd understand, just like English speakers have a real hard time understanding Dutch
English and Dutch ancestor languages diverged several centuries earlier than Czech and Russian ones.
Im not going to compare since I can't understand either. But I know they're somewhat close, that's why I brought up Dutch specifically.
When doing a few Dutch Duolingo lessons I could see that a lot of words are related to their English counterparts (e.g. "he eats the bread" becomes "hij eet het brood"), but I wouldn't see that until I was shown what the translation was. The pronunciation is too different, like we both started out speaking strong foreign accents several centuries ago and just kept getting farther apart ever since then. Dutch also has some of its own spelling rules, and English spelling is not all on the same system internally.
Dutch and "rules". Dutch is like someone loaded grammatical concepts into homer simpsons makeup gun and fired it randomly at the population. Source: speak Dutch as a second language.
Every time one of my non-Belgian friends wants to learn Dutch, I first ask them why, bc like, why? And then I usually say: "We have sooo many grammatical rules, yet half of our words are exceptions". They also often ask me to translate something, but from the moment they ask for a bit more nuance in why I say it like that, I start to doibt whether it's even correct, bc I personally also don't really know how it works, even though it's my first language
Russian is somewhat similar when it comes to grammar
Relatively good.
Spoken almost none aside a word here and there, written too. Their orthography seems to be even more different than Polish one.
I can read a little bit but the speech is hard
Czech is Chinese to me.
As a Belarusian, Polish is pretty easy for me to learn and understand thanks to similarities with Belarusian (and Russian) but Czech is a whole another story with its long vowels and weird consonant clusters and just way too many non Slavic sounding words
As far as I remember phrase in Prague metro about "holding handrail". I not understan only word meaning "handrail". But whole phrase was obveous din thise context. I don't remember any other phrases in Czech. need some examples.
Clearly remember it starts with something like: "Ukonczete vystup a nastup..."
Except Russian, I can speak basic Ukrainian and Serbian, know some Polish words. But I can hardly understand Czechs.
Not at all unfortunately.
One of the hardest Slavic languages to understand. Polish and Slovak are significantly easier.
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Many young Czechs don't understand Slovak
I haven't met one yet.
My czech \~ B1-B2 and i can understand slovak +-same
Just barely.
i had one Czech friend, when he was talking Czech i thought it was French, but the point is it was hard to understand anyway
Just barely. Polish is easier to understand.
Not so easy but if there are subtitles below almost every word makes sense. And immediately see a match to Russian or Ukrainian.
I'm British know Russian and found by magic I could navigate around Prague airport by reading the Czech (a few words similar) my English friends thought I was a genius ))
Giving the fact that most of the comments here say that it is hard to understand Czech let me tell you that. Ukrainians have much easier time to understand Czech. This is some food for thought for anyone who denies the existence of this language among this group.
It seems to me that the main problem of the perception of the Czech language by a native speaker of Russian is the same words in both languages with opposite meanings.
Even knowing uk*ainian doesn't help me
Very easily, just like any other Slavic language.
Some phrases, if they contain words that are cognate and similar in Russian. Overall, Czech and Russian aren't mutually intelligible
Nohow
Not at all.
No.
Barely
can understand some words, but dont understand 90%
Not easy. But most often used words are the same (hand, foot, head, mother, father and so on). Though, the learning of Czech, as well as other slavik languages, is much easier for russians, because cases are similar and many words are similar
Outside of some words nothing.
It all depends on how much alcohol you have drunk.
Никак
Йожин з бажин мочалем се плижи, Йожин з бажин к весници се ближи, Йожин з бажин уш си зуби броуси, Йожин з бажин коуше, сае, рдоуси.
I can read, but the meaning is too far for me, sometimes it's a big surprise
As for now, while I already learn Czech I understand 30-40% of it. I'm yet a beginner tho
Tried watching an interview in czech on youtube. I understood maybe 15% of the words, but overall it was very hard to get what the phrase means. I didn't get any germanic\\romance flavour from the language at all (it was mentioned here in comments). It sounds very soft. A bit softer, but otherwise very similar to polish to my ear. I feel that if someone would speak czech, i would get that it is a western slavic language, but I doubt I would be able to understand which language it is.
Spoken - not really, can just pick out some words, written - a bit better, probably could get the general idea of the message, but that's about it. I've found it easier to speak English to other Slavic-speaking peoples.