How different is Russian from Ukranian? ?

Question

Are they like Spanish and Italian... which are totally different languages but if you speak Italian you can kinda understand Spanish...

Or... are they like Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Mexico, which are pretty much the same but with some variations?

I'm just curious...

Thanks! ☺

Answer 1

More often than not you will not understand the other language...just individual words...I am Russian and can hardly ever understand what my Ukranian babysitter is talking about when she is on the phone...

Answer 2

I imagine it is like Portuguese. My mum is from Brazil and when she speaks Portuguese, it sounds completely different from the dialect spoken in Portugal. I think the dialect in Brazil is spoken with softer vowels/consonants.

I am learning Russian myself and I find the Ukrainian language a bit easier to learn. Like the Portuguese dialect in Brazil, Ukrainian has soft consonants and fewer consonant clusters. Overall I think Russian and Ukrainian share much of their vocabulary, just some have different pronunciation.

Answer 3

Well, they're both from the same language family - East Slavic so that's one similarity. They both use Cyrillic so there's another. Verb aspects in both are very similar. But one of the most important things is that Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian are all mutually intelligible meaning that a native speaker of one is highly likely to be able to understand a lot of the other. It's somewhere between the two of your examples, not as close as two Spanish dialects, but closer than two separate languages.

Answer 4

well umm....Russia is a country on the Eastern block of Europe and Ukraine is a country in the Northern section of Asia.  Physically I'd say about a thousand or so miles apart and several thousand years of history makes them different than one another.  The only thing that ties them together is that they were both part of the USSR.

In today's day and age after the fall of the USSR, I would say that Ukrainian is regaining a much needed relive of its own popularity and more than likely have adopted several words of Russian into it.  Kinda' like the difference between Hungarian and Romanian.