Are Croatian, Slovene & Serbian still mutually readable towards Poles despite them also being Slavic languages? Apart from the hilighted words, can they understand the details?
by Old_North8419
Are Croatian, Slovene & Serbian still mutually readable towards Poles despite them also being Slavic languages? Apart from the hilighted words, can they understand the details?
by Old_North8419
17 comments
not really
No
Enough to grasp the general context (something about the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killing dozens of thousands of people), but not enough to get all the details. As for cyryllic, it’s not universally understood in Poland and hasn’t been taught in Polish schools for a very long time.
Edit: I feel I need to correct myself: it’s not that cyryllic is not taught in Polish schools at all, but rather’s it’s not included in mandatory curriculum and as far as I know not all schools offer Russian/Ukrainian courses.
I get the general idea, certainly more than highlated words. Nothing from serbian tho due to the alphabet
I can understand ‘neselektivno’, ‘ubila desetke tisuca ljudi’, ‘spremenila zivljenja prezivjelih’ ‘ orozja/oruzja’ and the words in red but the rest not really.
I also speak Czech so I might not be a representative sample but even with that advantage it’s pretty hard. The middle text is easiest because the conjugation follows familiar patterns. I can understand it but I might miss important details.
Generally though, from my stay in Croatia and Macedonia, it takes about 3 weeks to get used to the major differences and then it becomes much easier.
Details? No, in either of the 3 text. Nobody under 30 will be able to read a word from the Serbian one. And few of the highlighted words make no sense too.
had not for highlighted keywords that make context clear i wouldn’t be able to say what it is about
Not this, however an example of mutual readability would probably be the song ‘Mama ŠČ’ by the band Let 3 (yes, the one from Eurovision 2023)
I can understand the general meaning, not all details, but more than highlighted. I can read Russian, so I can somewhat read Serbian, but it’s not exactly the same.
As a Serb who learned Polish i can tell you that it is understandable on only the basic level.\
Like before I got fluent I could understand only basic stuff like – good day, some plants etc .
But nothing too complex
As for the Slovene lol even us Serbs and Croats can’t understand them
FYI Serbian and Croatian are basically the same language, and Serbian uses both Latin and Cyrillic script
When trying to understand these similar languages you go off mainly by tone and vibe of spoken words, so it’s more difficult to decipher text than translate speech. I don’t know how to pronounce foreign spelling or read cyrillic, so I can’t understand 1st and 3rd paragraphs aside from some single words that only use familiar letters. I think I get the gist from the 2nd paragraph, though middle part of 2nd sentence looks like word salad to me.
The text talks about singular atomic bomb, which killed hundreds of thousands of people either directly or by inflicted wounds and radiation. The remaining ruins(?) are left as a reminder of this atomic attack, and survivors created a museum in memory of peace in Hiroshima, which reminds of the horrors from the nuclear explosion. There is also a quote, a motto of the museum(?) that I think means “Never again Hiroshima”?
I’m curious how much I managed to get right!
As a native Polish speaker with basic Russian knowledge, I understand maybe 75% of the text.
Better the second language than the first.
It’s not readable to me, though if I knew the actual pronunciation of these words, I’d probably understand a LOT MORE just because these languages all gave their own sets of special symbols that represent specific sounds that exist in both, but are not represented by the same visual symbol.
Croatian? No, Slovene makes some sense though
My try at translation by only reading the texts :
Atomic bomb nondiscriminately took lives of more than 10 thousand people and deeply broke and changed the lives of the surviving ones. (…) reports of survivors in Wednesday’s media material from the museum of peace in Hiroshima brings the world the horror and unhumanity of nuclear weapons (…) “Hiroshima never again”
Super easy to learn for any polish person due to the vast similarities. Also it’s super easy to learn cyrillic for polish people by first learning Bosnian and then switching to Serbian like I did XD