I’ve just seen this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk-XuU4kRzE) and wondered if Poles can understand Czech, perhaps not just in a face to face conversation including no face time or Skype where body language is present, I mean how far can a conversation on the phone in which he or she only speaks Czech, knowing the fact they have a phone number from the Czech Republic.
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It’s almost impossible, but there are some similar words.
We will understand some broken Polish and probably will miss the context as the same words have opposite meaning like: Szukać, frajer, bachor, bezcenny, burza, chudy, czerstwy, czerwiec, długopis, dobytek, jagoda, kraj, mecz, momentalnie, niebo, nieprzytomny and many many other false friends.
We would probably know, what the conversation is about, but would miss most details. It’s when we speak because, as you could see in the video, Poles doesn’t know how to read Czech diacritical marks, which makes things even harder.
Edit: While trying to understand Czech, it is helpful to be somewhat creative and know very old and unused Polish words. In two cases out of three it helps. But there is so many ‘false friends’ in our languages that it often leads you in the wrong direction either way.
Understanding spoken languages, even those similar to our native ones, is always tricky. As a Pole, I recognize many similar words or even whole sentences in texts written in Czech, but when I hear a natural conversation between the native speakers of the Czech language, I can understand almost nothing.
Only basic words. Slovak is similar to Czech and I can understand it much easier than Czech. For example in Polish word “goodbye” is “do widzenia”. In Czech is “na schledanou” and in Slovak is “dovidenia”.
I used to worked with Slovak providing Czech company hiring Czech crews. Too many false friends to make job quickly without mistakes. We choose to use English in essential communications.
🧍 Ahoj kolegové, přišel jsem číst vaše komentáře.
Not really. There are some similar sounding words (which usually have different meaning) but when 2 Czechs are speaking fast I don’t understand anything.
No. Even face to face i need english.
Not initially, but comprehension can improve quickly after enough exposure to the spoken language.
I’m Polish and few years ago I started working in Czech Republic. I was actually surprised that it was a bit hard for me at the beginning.
If they use common words and simple sentences then yeah.
But tbh i live like 5km away from a border between Poland and Czechia and Ive worked in czechia for a year so idk, i might have just got more exposure
To me both written and spoken Ukrainian is way easier to understand than Czech as there are less similar words in PL and UA that mean something completely different than in PL and CZ.
Picked up a Czech hitchhiker once, we had a great conversation, I understood nothing.
We can, but often we need clarifications, becouse similar words can have different meaning
Easly can
Szukam dzieci w sklepie
From my experience it very much depends on the speaker. With some practice you can quite well understand someone speaking clearly and with naturally slower pace, especially if you’re familiar with the subject. If someone is speaking faster and mumbling – forget it.
If you had any, even basic, experience with Czech before, it’s rather understandable
I actually had something like this, i joined a clan years ago in a game and we had a tourney, it was all good until I realised that they all spoke Czech, well either way we somehow were able to communicate and we won that tournament, so yeah I think it’s possible, but it’s definitely hars
Depends a little how skilled both sides are in this type of conversation, is is usually easier to read and to write texts. This is often the cases in similar languages like Portueguese and Spanish, more than 80% of words can be similar, but it easy to get lost when spoken, due to different pronunciation. Very shallow conversation with “yes/no” answers might be doable though, but not much above it.
written czech is sooo much easier to understand than it being spoken. when it’s being spoken, maybe there will be 1 or 2 words ill hear really clearly. a regular conversation would be out of the question for me, the chances of one of our words having a different meaning in the others language is too great:)