Central European leaders speak (some) English
It is said that English is one of the easiest languages to speak, at least on a basic level, but one of the hardest to speak fluently. That may be true, but most expats in Central Europe will quickly counter that pronouncing even the most basic Slavonic (or in the case of Hungarian, Uralic) words can be a struggle.
Those who find themselves in Prague or Budapest or Warsaw are often exasperated by the ludicrous amount of declensions they have to learn just to string a basic sentence together in the particular Central European language — never mind pronouncing the Czech “ř” or distinguishing between the Polish “ż,” “ź,” and “rz” in written or spoken form.
The logic goes, perhaps, that it ought to be relatively straightforward to learn English, since it doesn’t have the amount of cases these languages do (German has four, Czech and Polish have seven, Slovak has six, and Hungarian has a frightening 18). Of course, language learning is about much more than just cases, and focusing on only one aspect will quickly lead to simplistic and often entirely fallacious conclusions.
For the full story, please visit The Prague Post.
