Knowing Polish and understanding Russian
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.
Tags: language, Polish, russian, Russian film, Seventh cradle, slavic, Slavic languages
RSS feed for comments on this post
May 24, 2008at 1:15 pm
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 vaÅ™it?” I got confused but answered: “SześćdziesiÄ…t 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 “vaÅ™it” pronounced is very similar to polish “ważyć” (to weight).
May 25, 2008at 10:55 am
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.
May 25, 2008at 10:58 am
@ Barbara great comments and thanks for the feedback regarding knowing Polish and understanding Russian.
August 21, 2008at 5:36 am
I would love to learn more about this beautiful language