Does Czech language and Slovak language sounds to foreigners as sam... https://www.quora.com/Does-Czech-language-and-Slovak-language-s...

Slovak (language) Czech (language) Foreigners +3

Does Czech language and Slovak language sounds

to foreigners as same language?
Answ er Follow · 7 Request 

7 Answers

Robert Hodosi, Linguist, Analyses, Psychology,

Answered Dec 27, 2017

If you know a bit grammar, in Slovak there are not usually 2 long vowels in syllables
behind each other. In Czech language you have too many words with two or three
long vowels in syllables behind each other. Although words can sound almost the
same the melody of the speach is different. They say Czech language is more like
singing than Slovak. Slovak sounds more in the rhythm - not so many long syllables,
especially not next to each other.

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Sam Woodman, Self-studying Polish and Spanish, language aficionado

Answered May 11, 2017

Not in the slightest - as a (still-learning) Polish speaker, Slovak is immediately

understandable and clear, whereas Czech is just as unintelligible as Russian or
Bulgarian. Slovak and Polish seem to me to be only about as distant as English and
Scots, or Spanish and Catalan.

Surprisingly, most Czech speakers can understand a good deal of Polish, but most
Poles struggle with Czech - the only other example like this I know of is how most
speakers of Brazilian Portuguese understand Spanish, but not the other way around.

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Luboš Motl
Jul 30, 2017
I don’t believe you for a second that if you understand Slovak, Czech sounds completely
incomprehensible. Maybe you’re just listening to someone who only pretends to speak
Czech? If you had impartial equally reasonably selected ensembles of speakers, you would
have to agree that Czech and Slovak are close to being identical and their differences are
vastly smaller than their differences from any other language in the world, Slavic or
otherwise.
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Sam Woodman
Jul 31, 2017 · 1 upvote
There are HUNDREDS of language pairs with fewer differences than Czech and
Slovak - most famously being the also-Slavic Croatian and Serbian, or Bulgarian and
Macedonian, or even Belorussian and Ukrainian - all pairs of languages closer to
each other than Czech and Slovak are (which is still very close).

The only Slovak I was exposed to was the variety of Slovak spoken on the Polish
border, whereas I have only heard Czech in movies and TV. Without having studied
either language, I can understand literally twice as much Slovak as Czech - not just

1z4 28. 7. 2018, 16:17

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for the vocabulary, but also the intonation and the speaking style is rather similar.

The exact same phenomenon happens here in the USA between Quebecois French,
Spanish, and Portuguese (although they are more distant from each other than the
West Slavic languages are) - speakers of Brazilian Portuguese easily understand the
other two languages, Quebecois struggle with Spanish but understand much
Portuguese, and the Spanish speakers have difficulty understanding either one. You
would think intelligibility is a two-way street, but it rarely is!
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Luboš Motl
Jul 31, 2017
I meant language pairs whose one member is either Czech or Slovak. It wasn’t
meant to contradict the statement you make.

It’s totally sensible to say that intelligibility is asymmetric in general but in the
Czech-Slovak case, it’s almost perfectly symmetric.
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Graham Howe, worked at UK Border Agency

Answered May 18, 2017

All of the previous answers have been given by people who are to some extent
familiar with Slavic languages. But to someone who has no knowledge of them, yes,
Solvak and Czech do sound the same, as do Czech and Polish, Polish and Slovak and
all three of them with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian and even Lithuanian and
Latvian (which are not Slavic languages)

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Mihaela Corteza, Emergency Medicine

Answered May 11, 2017

I am fluent in English and Romanian (a Latin based language), and I understand

French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian (my mom’s side of the family speaks
an Ukrainian dialect at home). Slovak sounds to me just like Ukrainian (Slavic
language); Czech sounds Slavic, too, although a bit more mixed with other languages
and not as easy to understand.

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Christo Tamarin, worked at Retired

Answered May 12, 2017

My answer will be Yes.

Listening Slovak, at the first perception, I would exclude East Slavic languages at
once. Next, I would exclude South Slavic. Next, it is definitely not Polish.

At this point, I would have to select between Czech and Slovak.

And at this point, one may say that Czech and Slovak sound to a foreigner like me as
the same language.

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Does Czech language and Slovak language sounds to foreigners as sam... https://www.quora.com/Does-Czech-language-and-Slovak-language-s...

At the next point, of course, I would eliminate Czech very easy.

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Jagoda Januszewska
Answered Jun 11, 2017

I'm a Polish speaker. For us Slovak sounds more familiar. We are able to understand
it without learning it before. Czech for us is a bit more difficult to understand and
sounds more hard. And vocabulary is quite different. So most of us could notice if
someone is Czech or Slovak. But I can understand that it's easy for non-slavic
speakers to get confused because they sound so similar.

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Helen Brown, lives in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Answered May 11, 2017

No, they don't. My native language being Russian, I could understand Slovak much
easier than the Czech language when watching TV in a Prague hotel.

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1 Answer Collapsed (Why?)

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4z4 28. 7. 2018, 16:17