Is it too late for me to learn Polish..?

michal, i envy you. you're apparently a genius ;)

is between the primary age group of 18 to 35 years old!



tell me about it i studied it a year at the age of 13 here in the UK at school why i have no idea .. i wanted to do Spanish or German alongside French but got Latin instead.



This is true as Slovikians can understand the Polish when i worked alongside both at Wincanton

Sometimes I hear Slovakian spoken in the street and it is difficult to know if it is Polish or not as it is so similar to Polish-six weeks in Slovakia and I would be fluent in this language.

Why is Czech a difficult language?

It's on the same level as Polish & Slovak.

No no no :( It's not. Polish and Slovak are similar, Czech is similar on the grammatical level, tricky on the lexical (lotsa words which are written almost the same but mean a different thing, just to name jagoda = PL blueberry, jahoda = CZ strawberry), really challenging on the phonetical level. Pronunciation is a ***** (try this: Vlk škvrzl mrkl mrdl smrt frkl cvrkl krkl plkl prdl vrkl zblbl. Or this: Řežu a žeru, řežeš a žereš, žerou a řežou, žeru a řežu, žereš a řežeš, řežou a žerou. The "Ř" itself is often mispronounced even by the Czech themselves). If you still don't believe me, start learning - you'll be literally crying over an open textbook for the first 6 months :D

It's on the same level.

www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

here you've got a classification of languages based on the difficulty of learning by an English speaking student.

Thanks, glowa.

I find (very personal opinion) languages like English, French and German easier to learn (as I treated them all as a whole new territiory and thus learnt everything without any assumptions). With similar languages, you're tempted to draw conclusions that may be very often misleading. You base your learning on the false assumptions that something must work the same way, only if it is similar. Thus, learning Czech is for me just lots of dead ends and false assumptions ;)

Yeh, thanks Glowa. Cantonese is out for me then judging by my attempts to learn Polish !

I think that Sparrow meant that Czech and Slovak are similar in the fact that they are similarly difficult to Polish and not that the two languages are the same thing.

That's what I meant. I don't know much about it but I asked my dad he graduated in Slavic languages or whatever do you call it nowadays, so I trust his judgement

Yes, I think that he is probably right. All these languages are conected in the same way as English has similarities to Dutch and then the Dutch can understand a lot of German and if you study German you should be able to at least read quite a lot of Swedish. I have looked at some Slovenian words and they are similar to Polish. Slovak is probably one of the nearest living languages to Polish. If you know Czech, you should be able to learn Serbo Croatian fairly easily as it is nearer than Polish is. I have never studied seriously Czech or Slovak but I studied Russian at university and my wife is Polish so if I had to, then I should be able to fill in most of the other slavic languages to some extent.