Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In Polish there is 'szczoteczka', which took me just about forever to learn how to pronounce. I just could not hear what I was doing wrong.


Same word in Russian is "щёточка". The lengths to which Poles are willing to go instead of just using Cyrillic will never stop to amuse me :D


I struggled quite a bit with "существительное" when learning Russian.


I was talking about spelling. I can clearly see how these clusters of consonants characteristic of all Slavic languages can be a pain for a beginner, no matter how you spell them.


No Cyrillic imports, thank you. Russia decided to be the bully and murderer of its closest neighbors, don't need any more russian influence, even if literally just on paper. The further one is from them the more safety and prosperity there is, in every possible way.


Dude, this is a linguistics thread. Ukrainian also uses Cyrillic, btw


And Cyrillic is, if anything, Bulgarian originally.


What I found helpful in parsing those z combinations is just replacing them with h instead. for example, if you went up to a random monolingual English speaker and showed them "shchotechka" they could probably pronounce it reasonably well. All those z's just throw people off.


With Polish it may be even harder to go backwards, look for a clip from "Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową" movie on Youtube.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: