Ukrainian and Polish?

[Czarownica]

I know quite a few Ukrainian people who got fluent in Polish really fast and it got me thinking - is Polish naturally very easy for Ukrainian people? And if that's the case, is Ukrainian very easy for Polish people as well? I can't read the cyrilic alphabet, so I can't really check it for myself. I'd be cool if I could learn another language, this time without much effort... But it's probably too good to be true.

[justinroberts]

Yeah since both languages use the same alphabet it wouldn't be difficult for one to learn the other language. I learnt the cyrillic alphabet not too long ago and I have the hang of it. It only took me a day or two to learn it so it really isn't that hard. Just once you learn the sounds you can just look at Ukrainian words and try keep practising to pronounce those words.

[Czarownica]

Yeah since both languages use the same alphabet it wouldn't be difficult for one to learn the other language.

Huh? No, they don't  :confused:

[russianrocket]

Wrong, Ukrainian uses Cyrillic alphabet, while Polish uses modified Latin. Also many words have opposite meaning. Of course I cannot speak for every Ukrainian but I doubt it's really easy for them to learn Polish. Maybe a tad bit easier than German or English, but not by a lot.

[Neiv]

I have some experience with that, or so I could say.

My girlfriend is from Kharkiv, Ukraine and she started learning Polish a week and a half ago or so.

Well, she studies it at intensive courses in a translation agency bureau and she isn't in the first group (by far not) hosted there, it actually seems they are doing these kind of courses very often. The teacher ONLY speaks Polish with the students, with many of them (including her) having never read or seen a word in Polish before. The teacher speaks Ukrainian only to explain something about grammar and yet no one has a problem understanding everything she says.

So, I think it does come easily to learn Polish for people native in Ukrainian language.

Girlfriend also already wrote a small essay in it.

[anna3101]

It's definitely much easier for Ukrainians to master Polish than it is, say, for someone from Spain. I'm myself of Ukrainian origin and even though I've spent most of my life in Russia, my passive knowledge of Ukrainian is fairly good. When I moved to Poland, I found a lot of similarities between Polish and Ukrainian, and it helped me tremendously. I've also noticed that Polish people pick up other Slavic languages quite quickly. It's true that there are false friends and some things are quite different but all in all, knowing another Slavic language does help. A lot