What is the Easiest Slavic Language to Learn for English Speakers?

The first step to starting your language learning journey is to choose which language to learn. Your choice depends on your interests or how you want to use it. You might be seeking languages that have a lot of similarities with English, or perhaps you want to challenge yourself.

Some of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers are Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Danish, and Russian. Considering you stumbled upon this post, I can sense your curiosity to dabble into the world of Slavic languages. Let's dissect this part of the language tree, and find out what is the easiest Slavic language to learn for English speakers.

What are Slavic Languages?

The key to culture and people of Eastern Europe (and Russia) is the Slavic languages which include: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. There are over 300 million Slavic speakers in Europe and parts of Asia. The good news is that Slavic languages are closely related. They are also divided into three subgroups: South, West, and East with tricky pronunciations and a case system that's bound to throw anyone off.

East Slavic Languages

Beginning with the first subgroup of Slavic languages Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian. Most language learners will gravitate towards Russian because it's the most popular and widely spoken. There's also that charming literature aspect, I'm looking at you, Leo Tolstoy. However, if you aren't familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet or writing system, Russian will make you run away.

West Slavic Languages

Czech, Polish, and Slovak make up the next subgroup of Slavic languages. With this trio, you are still dealing with the wacko pronunciations and case system. On a positive note, all of these languages use the Latin alphabet which puts English speakers at an advantage. For this reason, Czech is definitely one of the languages that people gravitate towards the most, but Polish is the most widely spoken out of all three.

South Slavic Languages

The last bunch of Slavic languages is Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. The bad news for English speakers is that these languages don't primarily use the Latin alphabet like the Western ones. For example, with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, you will see a mixture of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet. Then add all the tricky pronunciations and case declensions on top of that. Although it seems like a nightmare, language learners are intrigued by these languages due to their uniqueness that sets them apart from the other subgroups.

Final Verdict

If you are intimidated by grammatical concepts or a completely different writing system, that is a defeatist attitude. Don't let the Cyrillic alphabet scare you away. With that being, which Slavic language should you try? Well, there is no right answer to this question, because it's subjective.

If you are looking for the easy way out so to speak, go for Czech or Polish since they use the Latin alphabet. If you don't want to deal with grammatical cases shoot for Bulgarian. In the end, you need to choose what interests you.

Learning a language is about passion not what's the easiest.