I was surprised to find a Polish film scene dubbed in Russian, having assumed they roughly understand each other:
“Poles can barely understand 60% of Russian. But Russian can only understand 15% Polish.”
Have you encountered something like this before?
Stanislaw Ulam’s view:
“When I speak German everything I say seems overstated, in English on the contrary it feels like an understatement. Only in French does it seem just right, and in Polish, too, since it is my native language and feels so natural”
In detail (French, English, German, Polish, Russian, Latin)...
"In French generalizations come to my mind and stimulate me toward conciseness and simplification. In English one sees the practical sense; German tends to make one go for a depth which is not always there.
“In Polish and Russian, the language lends itself to a sort of brewing, a development of thought like tea growing stronger and stronger. Slavic languages tend to be pensive, soulful, expansive, more psychological than philosophical, but not nebulous or carried by words as much as German, where words and syllables concatanate. They concatenate thoughts which sometimes do not go very well together. Latin is something else again. It is orderly; clarity is always there; words are separated; they do not glue together as in German; it is like well-cooked rice compared to overcooked.” (Bolding by me.)
Me:
English feels like a tailored suit; Japanese feels like a knitted tunic.
What are your impressions on languages you know, compared to one another?