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Comment by andr | Hacker News Reader

I am Bulgarian and I find that very hard to read. Much harder than Russian or Serbian. Many of the phonemes could be simplified to be made more universal. It feels very influenced by Polish, though, so I'd probably be easier for Central Europe Slavic countries.

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I'm Russian, and I can read and understand about 90% of their sample texts. It reminds me Serbian (though I don't know it or any other Slavic languages, and I've read more Serbian and Macedonian than any other Slavic language, so maybe there's a bias because of this).

BTW, Bulgarian is harder to read for me than Serbian or Macedonian.

Yep, totally agree. I'm Russian too and language is completely understandable.

Same here... it feels like Ukranian to me, but the only Slavic language I know is Russian.

Slovenian here and It's completely same for me.

Although I do understand southern Slavic languages and I also managed to pick some words from Czech in the course of my life.

We have a lot of turkish/altaic, or just old bulgarian (before our tribe came to the Balkans) words. I'm no historian, and even they do not agree, so take my words with a grain of salt.

I have noticed that we have for a lot of things - two words, one slavanian - that russian/serbian/polish/etc would understand, and one turkish-like that arab would understand.

I wonder if it seems close to the languages one is familiar with.

My native tongue is Romanian and I grew up on the border with Serbia - I used to speak Serbian near-fluently (but lost it after 2+ decades of not using it); I also know a little bit of Russian. This language seemed similar to Serbian to me.

My native language is Czech, and all sample texts looks very similar to Croatian or Serbian :-) Not much Polish. And yes, even for me it's very hard to read :-)

(Though, that might be because it has quite different spelling from polish. Spoken, it could be similar. It feels very ancient. :-))

Wow, I'm Polish and it looks Czech/Slovakian to me.

I think this is because we look for properties that are foreign to us, and skip properties that we familiar with when trying to understand the language. So, for example, you didn't notice some things taken from Polish, because you already know them, but you noticed things that look Czech to you, and thingie didn't notice Czech things, but noticed Serbian ones.

After looking at the grammar and dictionary, I find it much more similar to Czech than I thought after looking at just samples. Dictionary has quite a lot of Czech words, you'd only have to apply some rules to make it look more "modern" :-) (ija -> [i]e, throw out most of trailing i's, ični -> cký, g -> h…)

I don't know. It could be Czech… but 500 years ago :-)

I speak both Polish and Czech and this is very easy for me! I think I understand it all, but it really feels to me like Croatian/Serbian language :)

I'm Czech too and it doesn't really resemble any existing language to me. Definitely not Slovak, Polish or Russian. Maybe something several hundreds years old.

Yet, I found that just looking at the samples I'm not having much trouble understanding it.

Suggestion: try to read it out loud -- it helped me quite a lot with Polish. And here too.

I'm Czech and i think i understand almost everything

I am Bulgarian as well, and I had absolutely no trouble reading and understanding the passage on the home page. However, I also studied a bit of Russian when I was a kid. I was recently on a trip through Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria) and did not have much trouble communicating with people in these countries.

I'm bulgarian too, and no problem reading (the third column - with the cyrillic text).

Also Bulgarian, I can read it with no problems. "Tastes" like Croatian to me though. Definitely does not feel like Polish.

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