Ukrainian language similar to Polish?

I am a Ukrainian speaker. Ask me something in Polish and I'll try to see what it means. And please do not use the Polish letters/characters.

dze jest mojie pierogi

Pies uciekł do lasu, a kot do miasta.
Stol z powylamywanymi nogami stal w Szczebrzeszynie, gdzie znany chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie.
Co sadisz o boskiej Julii, klejnocie ukrainskiej sceny politycznej?
Dlaczego mnie juz nie kochasz?
On zarabia 10 złotych na godzine w sklepie.
Sasiadka mojej synowej splonela zywcem w samochodzie.
Lwow, Luck, Kamieniec Podolski i Zytomierz wiecznie polskie!

Lwow, Luck, Kamieniec Podolski i Zytomierz wiecznie polskie!

:)))

As a non-Ukrainian (as well as non-Polish) native speaker, I can understand Ukrainian through Polish more easily than Russian, even though I actually studied Russian formally, but never Ukrainian-:)

False friends are a problem, of course, as they are in ALL closely related languages, e.g. Polish/Russian/Ukrainian, Dutch vs. German, Danish vs. Swedish, Spanish vs. Portuguese or Finnish vs. Estonian......

Spoken Ukrainian is harder than the standard written variety, for instance, a basic newspaper headline or article. Hiere, i can sometimes figure out the root meaning from Polish, but not too often!

Even though I understood most of what you said Ukranian is surely closer to Polish. Some says it was born on the boundary with Rechpospolita as a mixture of Russian and Polish.

Being a strongly nationalistic (not only patriotic) people, I'm not sure a Ukrainian would agree totally with you. For me, Ukrainian sounds much closer to Russian than to Polish, above all due to those infamous palatalized consonants 'd' and 't' in both Russian and Ukrainian. Again, some greetings and base vocabulary appear more recognizable to a Polish speaker, I think-:)

On the West of Ukraine... :) But that's ok considering that people from Western and Eastern Ukraine can hardly understand each other.

Dialect differences notwithstanding, naturally--:)

Understand what I'm saying in Ukrainian.

Vitayu ya vas. Vi meni poneemayuti po ukrainski?

Witam was. Rozumiecie mnie po ukraińsku?
of course the Russian word (that I remembered from my school times) ponimat' was useful in this case :)

No, I wouldn't necessarily have understood that sentence--:) Probably would've have taken me a few to figure it out CORRECTLY (as opposed to just word for word). And yours is a most basic utterance, so I'm slightly embarrassed!

As far as I know "ponimat" is "razumet" in Ukranian... At least my ukranian friend uses mostly razumet. For Russians it doesn't matter though. Both ways are understandable.

Priwit Nobody!
Why not give us a few basic greetings and phrases in Ukrainian for the benefit of thsoe interested, possibly capitalising the accented syllables.
I myself know very little:
(Polish transcription) SZCZO poroBLAjesz?
DUżo DObro
Do poBAczenia
ja TEbe koCHAju (or) lubLU
DJAkuju
Win MAje boHAto SYniw (not sure of this one).
Brat nie howoRIT po ukraINśki.

I actually live in the U.S but was born in an Eastern European country. My last name is Polish and I speak around 93% Ukrainian and 7% Russian words in the mix. Keep in mind that I am a western Ukrainian and Polish by blood. Also, my grandpas dad was most likely Polish and he or his parents went all the way to western Ukraine, intermarried with the locals there, and then moved on to Moldova. When World War 2 started, my grandpas dad got called up to the war in 1942 and was sent back to Poland where I have evidence that he joined the Armija Krajowa. He killed 3 Germans, 1 a high ranking officer, before he got caught and was executed.

Apropos the previous poster's message, an older gentleman from Warsaw who had lived through the post-War period of the Gomułka era during the mid-60's, once remarked half kidding 'All Poles understand Russian, but NOONE speaks it!', which was undoubtedly a not so veiled reference to Russian as the "imperialist" lan-

guage of the Communist epoch.

There's allegedly a well-known joke which is the same in Russian as in Ukrainian. LOL. A Pole however, might not necessarily understand the punch line-:)

Wish I could recall it.

Well, I am a Polish and I study Ukrainian filology in Krakow. I have got Russian lessons too. I would say that Ukrainian is more similar to Polish than Russian, so don't be afraid :)

And I would second that as a Russian speaker.

As a native Polish speaker I personally met Ukrainians and if I didn't know Russian I wouldn't be able to understand them.
In my opinion Ukrainian is more similar to Russian than to Polish.

I would say that similar to Polish is Slovak language (Slovakia country) ,most of the time I understand them well, and I never studied Slovak (or Czech, which could help).

well..I'm Ukrainian but have a lot of friends in Poland. They speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian. We spend together sommer (Ukarainians, Russians and Poles). And they understood better Ukrainians, not Russians. Sure your knowledge of Russian helped yu very much. but if you didn't know both, Ukrainian would be easier for u


dUże DObre


This one was in Russian


Sorry, but your friend is mistaken. It sounds like "rozumIty" or "rozumIt'

Dobrogo ranku Seagirl

Russian, Ukrainian, Polish..... it's all Double Dutch to me

Thanks for the correction. I had now idea about how to spell it, I just heard the word and said the way I'd heard it. Equally well I could have said that in Serbian to understand=razumeti. I'm again not sure about the spelling, but that's approximately the way it sounds.

Russian and Ukrainian are grouped with the East Slavic languages along with Belorussian and some extinct tongues, while Polish is in the West Slavic group with Czech and Slovak. However, the linguistic histories are much longer, but vaguer, than the politiical histories. All these countries are quite new in terms of their current political boundaries---most less than 60 years old, some now less than 20. Western Ukraine and eastern Poland were once united and known as Galicia, and with the turmoil of the various revolutions and wars and the subsequent migrations, etc., one could quite easily have ancestors that came from what is now known as [country X] but who speaks the language/dialect from [country Y]. And in the border areas of all those countries where speakers are exposed to both languages, it's hard to say exactly what they are really speaking. For the south slavic speakers, it is a commonism, almost a joke, for a Serb and a Croat to argue---in a mutually intelligible language---that they are not speaking the "same" language, even though the biggest difference is that Serbian is in Cyrillic and Croatian in Roman alphabet---similar to the difference between Moldovan and Romanian. Of course, the Serb and Croat (or Moldovan and Romanian) would argue that point.

Ukrainian sounds like soft polish or funny russian.
In fact it seems to me more like a dialekt of polish language in the eastern borders than an autonomous language.But I maybe wrong.

Southern, how does Bulgarian or Croatian/Serbian sound to you? Funny Russian again?.. Yes, you are wrong. Ukrainian is a language as Polish or Serbian are languages too.

You totally are because you don't know the language.


Nobody, you are a Ukrainian speaker? My butt explodes laughing. You said:


First half is in Ukrainian, but construction of a sentence is wrong fluencywise. You have to say: Ya was vitayu. The second half is totally wrong. "Vy" - not "Vi", "mene" - not "meni", "poneemayuti" is RUSSIAN (also wrong - "panimayetie" in Russian), the rest is almost right, only "po ukrajinski" is written through a "-" like po-ukrajinski. Don't say what you are not. It is stupid and disrespectful to others.


"rozumity" is "to understand" in Ukrainian

Slo all the languages has more or less in common. I guess what southern wanted to point out is that Ukrainian closer to Russian than many other which is not surprising since it ranks second (right after Belorussian) in the chart of similarity other Slavic languages to Russian, whereas Serbian would be somewhere at the bottom of a list.

Bulgarian sounds like provincial russian.Serbian sounds like czech with many syncopated sounds.Polish sounds syncopated but with different intonation than czech so that sentences become a little rounded.Ukrainian sounds like soft polish,belarus like russian dialekt with polish words.

Have you been contusioned during a fight with a squirrel? Bulgarian sounds like what? Provincial? I showed you that you don't know Ukrainian, Russian and I doubt your Polish knowledge. Why do some squirrel fighters try to pretend being something else?

Syncopated? Brrr...

Is there really anything to challenge the conventional model of the early split between South Slavic and North Slavic, which then split into East and West Slavic, which then split into Russian, Belorussion and Ukrainian in the east and Polish, Czech and Slovak in the west? Certainly there have been borrowings between these languages, but the mass of Latin-derived words in English doesn't stop English being a Germanic language.