Thread: Are native Russian speakers 'language snobs' or tolerant?

Originally Posted by Marcus

I can. Czech and Slovak have very many stressed Rs and Ls - syllabic consonants. Bulgarian sounds similar to Russian (free stress, vowel reduction, palatalized consonats), Serbian I know a little. It depends whether you heard those languages much or not. Most Russians never listen to other Slavic languages, probably can recognize only Ukrainian and Belorussian.

I once knew a Bulgarian guy who could speak fluent Russian. I was extremely impressed by this at the time, and asked him lots of questions about it - how he had learnt etc.
Remember him saying that Russians he knew in London usually didn't realise that he was from Bulgaria at all, but thought that he was a native Russian speaker. That seemed very strange to me - he had never actually lived in any Russian speaking country, only learnt it in school and apparently used it a bit at university and early in his career. Perhaps Bulgarian is so similar to Russian but I found this very odd. Was on a blind date with this guy and was just grasping for topics of conversation which was how this came up! Lol!

Originally Posted by Hanna

I once knew a Bulgarian guy who could speak fluent Russian. I was extremely impressed by this at the time, and asked him lots of questions about it - how he had learnt etc.
Remember him saying that Russians he knew in London usually didn't realise that he was from Bulgaria at all, but thought that he was a native Russian speaker. That seemed very strange to me - he had never actually lived in any Russian speaking country, only learnt it in school and apparently used it a bit at university and early in his career. Perhaps Bulgarian is so similar to Russian but I found this very odd. Was on a blind date with this guy and was just grasping for topics of conversation which was how this came up! Lol!

That might individual, some people are good at accent, worked on it a lot. There was a girl at my grade in the university, a Bulgarian, and she has certain accent. She does not soften some consonants (like м in книгами), she reduces all the unstressed As to schwas (хъръшо while we say хърашо), ш and ж are a little bit softened, ы is not clear.
My brother's girlfriend is Bulgarian, she speaks accentless Russian, but she probably lived in Russia for a long time.