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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

> Finnish and Polish are relatively easy if you know Estonian or Czech

For me (a Czech person) Polish is like Czech with a ridiculously funny accent, lots of different words, but a very familiar structure.

Estonian or Finnish are totally alien, I wouldn't be able to tell whether a speech was about today's breakfast or a declaration of war.

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That's why I (a Polish person) love Czech people - we can have a great fun just by speaking on the most mundane things. Every (even the most boring) Czech sentence is funnier than the best joke spoken in English ;)

I find Slavic languages to be less distant from one another than other major Indo-European languages. They're by no means mutually intelligible when spoken, but you can kind of get by. There's also the Interslavic [1] conlang, which is targets mutual intelligibility without much additional learning. It's surprisingly readable, but like most conlangs, I think more of a solution is search of a problem than anything.

[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/

Interslavic is like 95 % intelligible for me, a Czech, and has a strong southern (ex-yugoslavian) vibe. I wonder what Poles think of it.

Same. It takes a little effort to read but it's understandable and it does feel Croatian or thereabouts. On a somewhat funny note, Chrome decided to translate the page in Interslavic from Czech to Polish and did a passable job.

What I find fascinating about Slavic languages is that I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other. It has basically zero chance of success in the Czech Republic to the point where it's easier to find an English speaker. I speak neither Czech nor Slovak and I cannot really distinguish them but I had this experience multiple times. In written form, both are similarly understandable to me (I can get the gist and guess the rest).

* the caveat about szukanie czegoś do picia still applies though.

> I can speak Polish in Slovakia*, get responses in Slovak and mostly understand each other.

i'd call slovak a "middle-slavic" language, the phonetics and the lexicon makes is easy for the other slavic spekers to understand

say, i can communicate with slovaks in ukrainian and there are no significant issues with understanding too. strangely, it doesn't work for czech. at all.

There is a saying that both Poles and Czechs perceive the other language as if small kids were speaking. From a Czech perspective, this seems to be true. And the resulting cuteness is a major source of fun :)

Sorry that sentence wasn't clear: Finnish is easy if you know Estonian, and Polish is easy if you know Czech.

The grammatical differences between Finnish and Estonian are largely systematic, except in the declining of nouns (where Estonian is kind of chaotic). Fully 35% of Estonian word stock is Germanic, so knowing some German would help.

Yes: I noticed in Tallinn the police cars were called "Politsei" (from German Polizei) in contrast to Finnish "Poliisi" (from Swedish Polis).

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