Anecdotal evidence—dated a woman in Birmingham who was a professional interpreter from English to Polish and she mentioned she sometimes often hired by visiting Slovak businesspeople who cannot find an English to Slovak interpreter and it works all right. Not without some confusion, but works. I was surprised, since that kind of politicial fragmentation began a good 1000 years ago.
Slavic languages resemble each other enough that people have tried to concoct pan-Slavic bridge languages for a long time. It has occurred to me that it might just be easier for someone to learn a relatively interoperable natural Slavic language (Serbo-Croat or Slovak, maybe, judging by this?) and try that as a bridge.
Slavic languages divide into three groups which are fairly different: Eastern (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian), Western (e.g. Polish, Czech), and Southern (e.g. Bulgarian, Serbian). I suspect that a natural “bridge” language might work within a group, but not between groups.
If you are a tourist in Ukraine, knowing basics of Russian is useful, the kind that the OP refers to. If you want some business done, just speak English; there would be enough translators. If you need to read something written in Ukrainian, and it is sufficiently complex and your Russian is not very good, have it translated; and even if your Russian is that good, but not your first language, it will cost you a lot of nerves.
(Also, if you know Ukrainian more or less well, it can help significantly to accept Russian, Byelorussian, Polish and Czech. I am not saying you will automatically understand those languages, just that adapting to them should be easier with Ukrainian as the base.)
I think the best return on investment in this regard is learning Russian. It is widely useful even in places like Kazakhstan or Bulgaria, due to it being taught at schools in the Soviet era. Of course that generation is aging, but not so much—I’d say over 45 people were still taught it and this is the age when they get into leadership positions and not retire for another 20-25. Besides, there are lots of scientific publications, SA of SSC mentioned medical research that never got translated and so on. Living in Central Europe, the most useful languages here look like English > German > Russian. This is of course widely location dependent.
Fun story: a friend of mine was invited to a project to the Silicon Valley and came back shaking his head saying “Next time I will learn some Spanish in advance so that I can have a chat with people like the newspaper guy.”
Less fun story: I really like the sound of the Italian language, but it does not feel like it worths investing into. I would not really want to live there, lovely culture but crazy politics and the “important” people speak English anyway. There is an enormous difference in ROI between say learning Spanish and learning Italian.
With 50+ people in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, even Hungary, so basically ex-Habsburg places, it tends to be useful. They picked up some amount of it from their grandparents who remember when it was the lingua franca of the monarchy and their English is not very good usually. The typical old Czech tourist in Budapest will try to communicate in more or less broken German.
Also for young people, in this region young people usually learn English but if they have capacity left, the second one is usually German. And for this reason, “eastern” subsidiaries of DE/AT/CH companies often keep the internal reporting language in it. Which reinforces people wanting to learn it.
The most creative usage I saw was some guys from South Tyrol who offered bilingual SAP consulting to DE/AT/CH firms having subsidiaries in Italy.
I also know a lady who went to East Belgium to work and it worked out well for her.
Note, though, that you basically need to achieve native-like levels of proficiency in order to use one Slavic language to understand another. So you may well never be able to collect this return on the investment at all. My Russian isn’t anywhere near this level and, living in Central Europe, the only use I ever make of it is talking to Russians. Signage in Slavic-speaking countries becomes somewhat comprehensible, but that’s about it otherwise. Russian does, of course, allow you to communicate in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic countries, which is nice if you want that, but also likely to be irrelevant for most people.
True, but also: I smell some significant business opportunities in the general direction of Central Asia. It is a very virgin market for e.g. tech products and they have natural resources / fossil fuels to pay with.
The Slavs just promoted their radical dialects to full-blown languages, mostly due to political fragmentation.
Anecdotal evidence—dated a woman in Birmingham who was a professional interpreter from English to Polish and she mentioned she sometimes often hired by visiting Slovak businesspeople who cannot find an English to Slovak interpreter and it works all right. Not without some confusion, but works. I was surprised, since that kind of politicial fragmentation began a good 1000 years ago.
Slavic languages resemble each other enough that people have tried to concoct pan-Slavic bridge languages for a long time. It has occurred to me that it might just be easier for someone to learn a relatively interoperable natural Slavic language (Serbo-Croat or Slovak, maybe, judging by this?) and try that as a bridge.
Slavic languages divide into three groups which are fairly different: Eastern (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian), Western (e.g. Polish, Czech), and Southern (e.g. Bulgarian, Serbian). I suspect that a natural “bridge” language might work within a group, but not between groups.
If you are a tourist in Ukraine, knowing basics of Russian is useful, the kind that the OP refers to. If you want some business done, just speak English; there would be enough translators. If you need to read something written in Ukrainian, and it is sufficiently complex and your Russian is not very good, have it translated; and even if your Russian is that good, but not your first language, it will cost you a lot of nerves.
(Also, if you know Ukrainian more or less well, it can help significantly to accept Russian, Byelorussian, Polish and Czech. I am not saying you will automatically understand those languages, just that adapting to them should be easier with Ukrainian as the base.)
I think the best return on investment in this regard is learning Russian. It is widely useful even in places like Kazakhstan or Bulgaria, due to it being taught at schools in the Soviet era. Of course that generation is aging, but not so much—I’d say over 45 people were still taught it and this is the age when they get into leadership positions and not retire for another 20-25. Besides, there are lots of scientific publications, SA of SSC mentioned medical research that never got translated and so on. Living in Central Europe, the most useful languages here look like English > German > Russian. This is of course widely location dependent.
Fun story: a friend of mine was invited to a project to the Silicon Valley and came back shaking his head saying “Next time I will learn some Spanish in advance so that I can have a chat with people like the newspaper guy.”
Less fun story: I really like the sound of the Italian language, but it does not feel like it worths investing into. I would not really want to live there, lovely culture but crazy politics and the “important” people speak English anyway. There is an enormous difference in ROI between say learning Spanish and learning Italian.
How useful to you see German outside of Germany, Austria and Switzerland?
With 50+ people in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, even Hungary, so basically ex-Habsburg places, it tends to be useful. They picked up some amount of it from their grandparents who remember when it was the lingua franca of the monarchy and their English is not very good usually. The typical old Czech tourist in Budapest will try to communicate in more or less broken German.
Also for young people, in this region young people usually learn English but if they have capacity left, the second one is usually German. And for this reason, “eastern” subsidiaries of DE/AT/CH companies often keep the internal reporting language in it. Which reinforces people wanting to learn it.
The most creative usage I saw was some guys from South Tyrol who offered bilingual SAP consulting to DE/AT/CH firms having subsidiaries in Italy.
I also know a lady who went to East Belgium to work and it worked out well for her.
Note, though, that you basically need to achieve native-like levels of proficiency in order to use one Slavic language to understand another. So you may well never be able to collect this return on the investment at all. My Russian isn’t anywhere near this level and, living in Central Europe, the only use I ever make of it is talking to Russians. Signage in Slavic-speaking countries becomes somewhat comprehensible, but that’s about it otherwise. Russian does, of course, allow you to communicate in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic countries, which is nice if you want that, but also likely to be irrelevant for most people.
True, but also: I smell some significant business opportunities in the general direction of Central Asia. It is a very virgin market for e.g. tech products and they have natural resources / fossil fuels to pay with.