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Here's what I mean (this is a question mostly to Erasure, Natalia, Misko and the people here who speak slavic language): so do languages like serbian, bulgarian, macedonian, ukrainian sound funny to you?
for example: some slavic languages contain words that have totally different meaning in other slavic languages. For instance, when I was in moskva years ago I encountered the following situation:
friends (russian) were calling another friend and one of them says "Я ошибался."(ia oshibalsia...or so) and in bulgarian this sounds like "I f*ck up" - it's like total insult, not something you would say over the phone in formal terms. Then...it was clear they got the wrong number, so i told one of the guys - let me try calling...then i did..and the guy on the other side of the phone said something sounding like: "Tyu oshibalis!" -...which in bulgarian is like "you f*cked up the phone!" .
The bulgarian word for error/mistake is "greshka" and not "oshibka", which is insult.
Another case: i was watching russian tv news and at one point the reporter says something like "ubiica skruilsia" or something. It's funny how they use the word "skril" while in bulgarian the verb will be "ukril" and not "sril" - "skruil" is used only in kid games...like hide and seek...it's like the killer was playing a game of hide and seek and not real attempt to hide himself from police .
Ukrainian and Polish sound like baby talk. The rest sound pretty normal. You get used to the slight vocab differences. Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian use a lot of vocabulary that's in Old Church Slavic, the language used in church services. So those who grew up going to church have that as a resource to help understand.
I speak Slovak, to me Russian and Ukranian sound kind of cool and "badass", Czech sounds really chill and funny, Polish has lots of sh and other soft letters which is what I always notice when I hear someone speaking it, Croatian, Slovene and Serbian just sound completely normal to me, except the words themselves are funny.
Yeah they may sound funny, but in a good way especially some words and phrases.
As for understanding, for me as a Russian speaker Ukrainian is pretty easy, Polish -- so-so (it's closer to Belarusian), while Czech or Serbo-Croatian can be hard to understand when spoken, but a bit easier in a written form.
Here's what I mean (this is a question mostly to Erasure, Natalia, Misko and the people here who speak slavic language): so do languages like serbian, bulgarian, macedonian, ukrainian sound funny to you?
for example: some slavic languages contain words that have totally different meaning in other slavic languages. For instance, when I was in moskva years ago I encountered the following situation:
friends (russian) were calling another friend and one of them says "Я ошибался."(ia oshibalsia...or so) and in bulgarian this sounds like "I f*ck up" - it's like total insult, not something you would say over the phone in formal terms. Then...it was clear they got the wrong number, so i told one of the guys - let me try calling...then i did..and the guy on the other side of the phone said something sounding like: "Tyu oshibalis!" -...which in bulgarian is like "you f*cked up the phone!" .
The bulgarian word for error/mistake is "greshka" and not "oshibka", which is insult.
Another case: i was watching russian tv news and at one point the reporter says something like "ubiica skruilsia" or something. It's funny how they use the word "skril" while in bulgarian the verb will be "ukril" and not "sril" - "skruil" is used only in kid games...like hide and seek...it's like the killer was playing a game of hide and seek and not real attempt to hide himself from police .
No, they don't sound funny to me - in fact when I've listened the last time that video on the "languages of Europe" - they all sounded rather pleasant to my ear, except for may be Russian. Russian is more defined out of them all, so it sounds more "angular," and yes, more like "badass" language as someone mentioned here.
Other Slavic languages do not sound "funny" to me (those "false friends" kind of words are unavoidable in any other group of languages I suppose, because Magnus I think was posting the examples of "false friends" words in Germanic group too.)
I still can recognize a lot of those words being used in Russian language in earlier times, because you'd still meet them in literature, and not only there. For example the Bulgarian "greshka" that you've mentioned, leads to the verb "gre****" in Russian ( to "sin" AND to "make a mistake.") So although Russians wouldn't use such noun as "greshka," but you'd still meet something like "pogreshnost" where you can clearly recognize the common root, alongside with unfamiliar to Bulgarians "oshibka."
Now both verbs "skryl" and "ukryl" are used in Russian, but they'd slightly change their meaning. ( As I've said Russian seems to be more developed, more defined and more academic out of them all.
"Ya oshibalsia," - this particular verb is used in past continuous by you, so that wouldn't even work according to the situation you've described, so can't help you here. So as I've said it looks like Russian language still has a lot of words from older roots ( and that's what it shares with other Slavic languages, ) but it has plenty of words of different roots too. In this respect I don't find other Slavic languages sounding "funny; the only exception is Ukrainian, that sounds like a hickish version of Russian if I can make the long story short. I still love the sound of it ( this hickishness gives it a more singing sound comparably to Russian,) but if my parents back in Moscow would have ever heard me trying to speak Ukrainian, they'd call the ambulance I think. They'd be really alarmed))))
I understand 80% of Macedonian, some 40% of Russian and Ukrainian...and 30% of Serbian. While Polish, Czech sound as a different language, can't understand a single word especially Polish.
No, none of them sound funny to me, just different. Serbo-croatian sounds a bit rough to my ears, Polish - fairly familiar, but still very difficult to understand. Spoken Bulgarian also is difficult to understand, but when written, it makes much more sense . I think the cyrilic script makes it easier, written Polish for example looks like a complete mess to me
I don't understand why people say Russian sounds hard or "badass", to me east Slavic languages sound softer than the other ones.
Slovenian probably has to be the weirdest one, I understand 0% of it.
I also rarely found something funny in the Slavic languages. On the contrary, many Ukrainian words more accurately reflect the subject than their Russian words. In my opinion the Russian language was a long period of development than Ukrainian. By reason of "the academy," some of the words have lost the inner meaning (for example, the word "structure": Russian "состав" and Ukrainian "склад").
From funny: the word "torch" in Russian sounds like a curse word in English. It was funny, when Russian soccer club "Fakel" came to play with the English team in England.
Oh yeah I remember when Fakel Voronezh played in the Russian Premier League, some fans called it "F..ker".
Btw, we in Belarus have a football player named Igor ****ov (Шитов), when our national team played in England, local fans probably had some fun.
Last edited by Marmel; 12-08-2014 at 11:23 PM..
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Russian is more defined out of them all, so it sounds more "angular," and yes, more like "badass" language as someone mentioned here. 
