Polish Ukrainian Mutually Intelligible - Slavic Languages Comparison

[Root]

Which language did you use then? Do you speak Polish?

Russian with my basic Polish vocabulary I learned on my own, however I could easily switch to English but I didn't.. if I needed to learn one of the Slavic languages I'd either begin with Polish or Serbo-Croatian to be fluent in

[Roy]

why is Polish so difficult to learn and understand, even for speakers of other Slavic languages ?

is it because it's so heavily inflected

I think being heavily inflected only matters ... in the sense of being irregular, but otherwise there are more important reasons behind it. For example:

Polish has quite a distinct vocabulary and its pronunciation / phonetics can make understanding of spoken Polish more difficult than some other Slavic language that have less and more simple phonotactics. In Polish in places where in other Slavic languages bar
Upper and Lower Sorb you would expect /l/ consonant you come across /ł/ - IPA /w/ and English w.

Also our vocabulary contains much more non-Slavic borrowings than other Slavic languages. I don't mean these more recent new English words but those of Romance (usually straight from Latin)origin and some German words. But even someone who knows Latin & German would find out that these words have a different meaning than in these two languages. Poles are hardly aware of how much of it there is in Polish. Czech language has a vocabulary that is much more Slavic than modern Polish, albeit it is in a significant the artificial creation of those reviving this language back in the XIXth century where it was becoming moribund. Many of these words were made up neologisms and some were dug up words from the Middle Ages.


From the 16th to the 19th century, borrowings from Latin and French were very popular in literary Polish - called makaronizmy, but then they became obsolete and went out of use with the change of trends. Polish authors would throw in random Latin sentences or words into Polish text or to create their own quasi-Polish out of it to appear more educated.