Even though the writing between the two languages is similar, there are still noticeable differences in some grammatical concepts. The key problem of Bulgarian is the different gramar the lack of declination and the use of postpositive articles. http://www.izviestija.info/izviestija/, I was born in Canada to a Serbian family and speak Serbian so I am a good control as I was never formally educated in Serbian and its grammar. As the old political formations crumbled and new ones emerged, Ukrainian got mixed up with the Polish, Austrian, Hungarian, and Romanian languages. Ukrainians understand Russian, but this is mostly because of the high exposure to the Russian language in media and everyday life. These two languages are pretty close to each other, especially in their written forms. A Ukrainian can easily read simple texts in Polish without a The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. So, is Ukrainian closer to Polish or Russian? There was limited democracy and the nobility the szlachta were able to vote for their monarch. Personally, knowing all three languages, I would say it's 50-50. And the centre and the east was part of the Soviet Union, although Ukraine gained its own identity as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and had elements of statehood. Linguistically, the East Slavic people were closely related. This was a powerful and militarily successful territory, which went from the Baltic Sea right down to the Black Sea, including almost all of present-day Ukraine. One thing that means is, when we hear from Vladimir Putin that essentially Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, thats at the very least arguable because Ukrainians have lived under a variety of tutelages, whether Turkish or Russian or Polish. Has anyone actually mentioned that Ukrainian and Russian, along with Belorussian are East Slavic languages. Until the Ukraine That's actually a really cool thing about Slavic languages. Take Your First Lesson Free This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. it was mandatory for schools to teach it) and everyone hated the language, because we hated the 'Russkie' oppression itself. Ukrainian and Russian languages are not mutually intelligible although many words are. How well speakers switch or understand each other depends on exposure. Until recently Ukrainians learned both languages. Switching was easy. There is a difference for Russian speakers who grew up without exposure to Ukrainian.