Knowing Polish and understanding a Russian film
I am an American that learned Polish, to some level. I was watching the Russian film last night titled “Seventh Cradle”. It is like a Russian ”Indiana Jones”. There were no subtitles nor lektor. I did not realises this when I started the film. Now the good news is, even though I am not an expert in Polish I could watch the film with little problems in Russian. Polish and Russian are different languages. But combined with a fast action visually intensive movie like the “Seventh Cradle”, and a knowledge of Polish, I could understand the movie fine. This was a huge surprise to me. Further, it shows the interconnectedness of the Slavic languages, like Russian and Polish, which were the same language less then a thousand years ago. If you learn one Slavic language, you can most likely communicate in an Slavic language country. In total there are a lot of people who speak a Slavic language.
8 responses to Knowing Polish and understanding Russian
Well, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’m a native Polish speaker and know Russian well. There are many words that could be just misunderstanded in Polish vs Russian. For example “eyes” in Russian is pronounced as our word meaning “stones”.
And it’s not true that if one learns one Slavic language, one can most likely communicate in an Slavic language country. My Czech friend came to me and asked: “Jidlo ty vařit?” I got confused but answered: “Sześćdziesiąt kilo.” Then she got confused because she asked me if I were cooking something and I thought she asked how much I weighted.”Jidlo” is pronounces as polish “ile” (how much) and “vařit” pronounced is very similar to polish “ważyć” (to weight).
Polish and Russian are about 50% the same. Czech and Slovak no problem. If your talking about understanding every detail, than you have to study a little, but generally Polish can understand other Slavic languages with little problem if they are western Slavic and in a general sense if they are Eastern or Southern Slavic. I am not a Polish native speaker but I speak Polish and have little problem understanding the general sense of any Russian movie I watch in Russian. I get enough to follow the plot in Russian.
@ Barbara great comments and thanks for the feedback regarding knowing Polish and understanding Russian.
I would love to learn more about this beautiful language
i’m polish and i don’t understand russian, i may comunicate with slovakia, czech, latvia, but not russian, i see russian movie “night watch” and trust me…i don’t even got a point of this movie, there is few word may sound similar, but whole language is different
Latvian, Slavic langugaes Russian Czech and Ukrainian
Piotr how can you understand Latvian? It’s totally different from polish and not Slavic at all. Latvian sounds more as Lithuanian (I guess it’s a brother languages). And same goes with Czech even it’s a Slavic language. I know some basics of Czech but if you don’t teach it you will not understand it at all! By the way I’m polish and I understand well Russian or Ukrainian even I never learned it. But only speech, the hard one is too read Russian cause of Cyrillic.
@Piotr, I watched night watch in English and I do not understand the point. Its a crazy science fiction moves with a many unexplained lose ends. But I watch Russian TV and Russian day time drama’s everything is clear. Movies about 1/2 I understand but can guess the rest. My wife is a native Polish speaker and she said it would take about a month of watching Russian TV and she would get it pretty good, if she just learned the core vocab. Me I am a none native speaker of Polish and I think it would take 2 months to know Russian to a reasonable level watching movies and TV and learning words. You are right Russian is not like Czech or Slovak but Russian is still a Slavic language.
Understanding Russian and Polish
It’s hard for me to say because I learned Russian (I’m majoring in lingusitcis and I have learned a number of languages) but I remember that before I learned it I could not understand it being a native speaker of Polish. I would say that a native speaker of Polish could probably understand maybe something like 10% of Russian words if the other person peaks slowly and probably about 5% if they speak fast and use colloqualisms. If you are a speaker of Polish the easiest languages to understand are Slovak, Ukrainian and possibly Belarusian. Czech, Russian and Serbo Croatian are further along the continuum and are harther to understand for Poles.Bulgarian is also Slavic but is practically unintelligible to speakers of Polish.
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