*Correction* 3:25 чыгунка čyhunka

I’m Ukrainian and I fully understand Belarusian with out any problems. Even if I don’t know the word they are understandable in context. And I hope more people spoke Belorussian in Belarus, but it’s difficult times. I love your language🤍❤️🤍 Живе Беларусь

I am Belarusian and I can understand Ukrainian language well. They are indeed mutually intelligible, though maybe at first you have to pay closer attention to what is being said or reading is a bit slower. Overall, one gets used to another language very fast so understanding it doesn't require any special effort. Thank you for using our national flag ♥

As a Ukrainian, I understand 95% of Belarusian both spoken and written.

My children, who know the Belarusian language, can easily understand Ukrainian cartoons and read Ukrainian children's books.

As a Ukrainian, this video was very interesting for me! I have never tried to learn Belarusian in a serious way but once again confirmed that our languages are very similar! Also your Ukrainian pronunciation is impressive!

Thanks for you work. Belarusian Classical Orthography includes the letter Ґ, ґ (G, g), Vocative case, words of Greek origin like этэр, Атэны instead of эфір, Афіны, simple form of the imperfective future tense. I speak both Belarusian Ukrainian, I am able to understand Polish, Slovak, a little bit Czech as well as I see a lot of common words in German, English and even Danish/Norwegian. Thanks again for your video. Staying tuned for the upcoming releases🤙❤️

I am Belarusian, and my wife is Ukrainian. We use Belarusian or Ukrainian in written form (in chats, etc.), but in spoken form, we use something in between. It's difficult to use proper pronunciation when everything else, except the pronunciation, is almost the same. I also mostly use the Latin script for Belarusian, but I use the Cyrillic script for Ukrainian on a daily basis. However, I use the Cyrillic script for the Belarusian language in official documents.

Цудоўны разбор. Украінская абсалютна зразумелая, асабліва, калі часта чытаць ёю ці слухаць яе

Bielorusi, chráňte a vážte si svoj krásny jazyk ! Je to vaše dedičstvo po vašich predkoch, nesmiete ho nechať zahynúť!

Вельмі добрае інфарматыўнае відэа! Дзякуй за вашу патрэбную працу ў распаўсюдзе ведаў пра Беларусь сярод замежнікаў, бо, на жаль, пра Беларусь, якая доўгі час знаходзіцца пад расейскай акупацыяй, ведаюць у свеце вельмі мала, а калі і ведаюць, то часта скажона і аднабока пад уздзеяннем расейскай і лукашысцкай прапаганды.

I'm a Polish guy, and yes, both Ukrainian and Belarusian are PARTIALLY intelligible for me. Belarusian seems to be a bit easier to understand. Sadly, not many people speak it... I'm learning some basic Ukrainian now, because it's beautiful and I want to speak with my Ukrainian friends in their language :) Cool that you use old Belarusian flag :)

I`m Ukrainian and they are actually much more mutually intelligible then you might think. The different words and false friends are oftentimes just a less common synonym, or you can understand what was meant by the way the word is formed or by the context. At first the spoken form was more understandable, but now I`m used to their alphabet and it`s pretty much equal now

Btw, Ukrainian also has the sound /ў/ (Ŭ or Ł) but it is not represented as a different letter. In Ukrainian, the letter "в"(v) represents 2 sounds /v/ and /ŭ/. When "в" is written before a consonant or in the end of a word, it should be pronounced as /ŭ/. In any other case, it's just /v/. For example, the name of the capital Kyiv is actually pronounced as /Kyjiŭ/. And the word "вовк"(a wolf) is written as "vovk" but is pronounced as /voŭk/ because after the first "v" there's a vowel and after the second "v" there's a consonant. In the video 8:14 you can hear that the word "čytaŭ" and "čytav" are pronounced the same way, although it is written differently

I am Polish and have no problems with understanding both Belarusian and Ukrainian , but I grew up learning Russian as a mandatory language as a child. Now I can understand all three without problems .

I have never tried learning either (except for a few minutes with Ukrainian on Duolingo) but Belarusian in particular I find very fascinating and would love to learn more of. - As for the video, thanks this was a good video. I love the fact that you use Łacinka for the latinisation and that you also mentioned the Belarusian Arabic alphabet. Great stuff.

I'm Belarusian, and i've been watching Ukrainian content since 2014. It's qite undestendable for those who can speak Belarussian. Glory to Ukraine!

Thank you so much for this video! I've been googling like crazy to understand the exact difference between these two languages, but only ever came across comparisons between Ukrainian/Polish or Ukrainian/Russian. So finally! Well done :)

As a Ukrainian I understand 90%+ of Belarusian. Unknown words are understandable from the context. I watch KZfaq videos in Belarusian without any problems in understanding. And I never studied Belarusian.

Belarusian also has the vocative case. It was excluded by the soviet authorities, but is still in use.

Я розумію білоруську, білоруси розуміють українську.

Great video! As a Ukrainian, I stumbled upon a few videos in Belarusian and had no problem understanding the language, although I probably wouldn't replicate it without at least a few weeks of learning.

Thank you for making great videos comparing Ukrainian and both Polish and Belarusian!

Дякую за цей гарний ролик! ❤ Білоруси чудова нація, і я вірю що вони знайдуть свободу!

Wonderful video! The quality is level of Langfocus channel, even some patterns and stylistic is similar. And I'm specially glad being native Belarusian speaker how correct this video is. Thank you for your work. It seems you some east Slavic speaker, which language is your native?

as Ukrainian speaker, I find Belorussian to be completely mutually intelligeble given knowledge of ukrainian dialects and some other words in Belorussian. The only problem is the reproduction of language which is impossible due to my not suffice practice of spoken or written Belorussian

Vialiki dziakuj! That's the best and the most accurate (99%) video I've ever seen regarding Belarus and Belarusian. To your questions - I never experienced any problems understanding Ukrainian, be it spoken or written, same as all Belarusians I know, while Ukrainians might run into difficulties with some Belarusian constructions, happened to me now and then during communication with different Ukrainians in our national languages. When it comes to writing, I received comments from various Ukrainians that it was problematic to get used to written Belarusian at first, while understanding the spoken form was effortless on the contrary. So, my presumption is that the mutual inteligebility between the two is slightly skewed (Belarusians understand Ukrainian slightly better than Ukrainians understand Belarusian), still the languages are highly mutually inteligeable.

I'm Belarusian, grew up speaking Russian but we had Belarusian classes in school. I couldn't really understand Ukrainian as a kid, but I've since moved to the Czech republic and learned its language, and found that it helped me a ton with Ukrainian. These days understanding Ukrainian speech isn't an issue for me, even though it takes a bit of effort to do it on the fly.

Дякую за таку професійну роботу! Це було дуже круто. Я, як носій української мови, можу без проблем розуміти розмову та письмову білоруську, і дуже часто дивлюся білоруськомовних ютуберів. На відміну від польської мови, котра вельми зрозуміла на письмі, однак під час розмови треба старатися вловлювати суть

As a Belarusian, I understand both perfectly in written and spoken form. It’s pretty hard for me to speak Ukrainian since I have nowhere to practice it, but it’s easier for me than for most Belarusians because I watch a lot of Ukrainian content.

Дзякуй за такую грунтоўную працу! Годна! Dziakuj za takuju hruntoŭnuju pracu! Hodna!

I'm learning Ukrainian, and was quite surprised when I realised I could understand quite a bit from some youtube videos in Belarusian 😊

Actually Ґ also exists in Belarusian in Taraškievica if I'm not mistaken.

Thank you for using white-red-white flag!

This is seriously one of the best language channels I’ve seen yet. Please consider making a comparison between Bulgarian and Macedonian! I made a romanized alphabet for Bulgarian (for transliteration purposes), because non of the official transliteration alphabets are considerate of Bulgarian spelling. If you make a video, I can send you the link for the alphabet :D

As a Belarusian speaker, it is a common practice to have a bilingual conversation with a speaker of Ukrainian. I have a feeling Belarusians tend to understand Ukrainian a bit better, then vice versa due to unequal exposure. Written form is a bit easier as it alleviates some phonetic differences. Thanks for the video!

As a Belarusian native speaker I understand the Ukrainian language quite well, however I can miss the point of the sentence sometimes as there are some lexical differences between the languages. For example I wouldn’t ever think that “мандрівник” and “вандроўнік” mean the same thing (“a traveler”)

Nice video. Do you have in plans videos about more minor slavic languages, like Kashubian, Rusyn, Polesian or that language in Hrvatia that difference from standard Hrvatian like Ukranian from Russian, but people usually call it Hrvatian too, etc? And if you do, it'd be video about language itself or compare like that one?

Absolutely correct and great video! Thank you 🥰

This is probably the most detail-conscious comparison of Ukrainian and Belarusian I've seen on youtube yet, great job! Very interesting stuff

I'm Ukrainian native speaker and I really almost fully understand Belarusian. There are not so many different words in our languages but you can understand their translation in the most cases through the context. It's a little unusual read Belarusian texts but I'm anyway understand almost all. But I have so much doubt a lot of Ukrainians can write in Belarusian.

I am Ukrainian and I was amused when i heard Belarusian for the first time and understood in completely. I tried to read Belarusian blogs, news, some verses - I understood them, ghe meaning, and if there was unknown word for me I could understand them from the context. It is pleasant to hear and read Belarusian, but it's impossible to propere spell it

I've been trying to learn Ukrainian for a while now, because my girlfriend is from Ukraine. Previously I started learning Russian, because she told me, it would be more useful for everyday communication. Coming from German background I somehow had the feeling that Russian was easier to learn. Actually it was not much more difficult than learning English in 5th grade, once you got into the basics. It really gave me the impression that the linguistic system was quite similar. On the other hand Ukrainian vocabulary and grammar are a lot more different from Russian than I initially expected and it still gives me a hard time. I have the feeling that the languages that have been used officially by imperial or colonial territorial powers are also the ones, that are quiet easy to learn, so multicultural populations would be able to communicate easily by a universally applied standard within the sphere of influence of the central government. So Spanish, English or Russian appear like generalized versions of a variety of languages that summarize the outstanding characteristics, that link familiar languages. Like High German is more or less a standardization of many local dialects, too. I'm definitely not an expert in linguistics and I guess, this is a very simplistic and naive evaluation and there is probably a lot more to it than I can grasp, but it seems like an interesting speculation to me. Please correct me, if I'm wrong. Thanks for the video. You have inspired a genuine interest in linguistics in me.

коментар для підтримки і просування корисного та науковопопулярзаційного каналу!

Ukrainian is my native language, and I've been learning Russian since childhood. Because of this, I can effortlessly understand spoken Belarusian and comprehend about 90% of written text without any formal learning.

I am glad that you used the white-red flag.

To me as Ukrainian, Belarusian are generally understandable, many words ofcourse different, but reading and listening to it is simple

Одразу видно , що автор є адекватною людиною. Дякую , було цікаво.

It would be cool to see a comparison of Polish and Belarusian as well. Of course they are not as similar as Belarusian and Ukrainian, but still there are a lot of similarities. For example, Belarusian has a huge number of Polish loanwords, and also in the western regions, especially in Hrodna, some Polish grammatical structures have been adopted. For example, in Hrodna one could sometimes hear in the structure of the future tense from the old people, e.g. I will work, as "я буду рабіў", very close to Polish "ja będę robił" instead of the Belarusian variant "Я буду рабіць". Also in the western regions of Belarus, the verb "to be" was often used, and the grammatical forms "it is" or "that is", while in modern literary Belarusian you don't need "to be" verb. Also in Belarusian the absence of something "няма" is Polish "nie ma". I am not even talking about the closeness of the phonetic component of the languages with the presence of a large number of hushing sounds in both languages. By the way, the Belarusian language also uses the Latin alphabet, and it seems to be quite understandable to Poles.

It's funny to read comments about "wrong flag of Belarus" and "wrong map of Ukraine". The author did everything right. Thanks for the video about the Ukrainian language!

For me as Ukrainian speaker it is much easier to understand spoken Belorusian than written one. To my estimation I am able to understand about 95 percent of spoken Belorusian.

I speak intermediate Russian and i have heard some Ukrainian while traveling in Ukraine, especially in the west of the country. But I have never heard Belarusian. Interesting comparison. Wishing a speedy victory for Ukraine and democracy for Belarus!

There are no problems when reading or listening to the Belarusian language. Some obscure things are understood in context.

I really like your movies, especially about Slavic languages. I am native 🇵🇱 speaker, speaking 🇷🇺 as well and understanding quite well 🇺🇦, belarussian, 🇸🇰 and 🇨🇿. In this movie you gave an example: “Travelers are moving all the time”. Which is ok, but if you read translation, both Ukrainian and Belarussian, it means “The travellers are having sex all the time” in Polish 🤣 рухаються or рухаюцца means to have a sex in PL slang language. Just fyi and as another examples of fake friends in Slavic languages 😀

Poles, Belarusians and Ukrainians are brothers forever

Thank you very much for this video

Yes. This is flag of Belarusian nation. Not a post-soviet republic

Probably it's dialectic, but in my Ukrainian speaking environment, the word "shmat/шмат" is using to describe something big(particularly if you are using emotions like ShmAAt/ШмААт) as in Belarusian language. But if you say "shmatochok/шматочок" or "shmatok/шматок" that's mean piece of something small

Thank you for this video! This is something incredible! Also thank you for the historical white-red-white (БЧБ - бела-чырвона-белы) flag - it says that you have learnt the history of our countries well. This is very deep analysis: historical reference and detailed explanation. Some of these things I have known recently, but some of these I haven't known at all - for example simple form of imperfective future in Taraškievica - so it very shocking to me see all these here. Great video! It's worth saying that Ukrainian have it's own Latin writing, different from the Belarusian one; we are trying to return vocative case in Belarusian; examples to this video were written in Narkamaŭka, but I believe it would be better to use Taraškievica for it. As for the rest: I have no words. It's so cool! And again some thanks. Thank you for "BelaruSian", but not "BelaRUSSIAN" - Belarusian isn't part of Russian Thank you for such good spelling! And thank you for showing our real history, OUR history, but not from russian's empire prospective. It's worth a lot! And thanks to you more people can know more about Belarus and Belarusians, Ukraine and Ukrainians - this is very important in the war. *Answers to the ending questions* We really can understand each other. This applies to both spoken and written form - I think it's equally easy for me to understand. I have friends from Ukraine and we communicate freely each in their own language (sometimes I even correct their mistakes! :D ). At the very beginning it can sometimes be hard to understand some words but it comes with experience. I easily can watch videos in Ukrainian, write comments in Belarusian and be understood! Also I can find comments in Ukrainian under videos in Belarusian. We can understand each other, so there is no any language berrier between us. P.S. With some training we even can speak and talk in each other's language! E.g. I can say паляниця, митниця, but can't say Укрзалізниця. My Ukrainian friends can say Шчучыншчына, дзьвесьце дзевяноста дзевяць (299), but can't Я ўяўляў немаўлят. For the Belarusian-speaking: паспрабуйце сказаць: «У Іўе ў яе ё я». Удачы, ахах. Іўе - месца ў Беларусі такое ёсьць. Нагадаю, што літара І можа перадаваць два гукі [й'і]: [у й'іўй'э ў й'ай'э й'о й'а].

Nice video and an interesting and well prepared analysis of the two languages. I speak Polish so they both sound familiar to me, and are quite easy to understand. Especially Belarusian. I spotted a funny false friend between Polish and Ukrainian/Belarusian 😂 namely 9:40. The sentence in polish would mean "travellers are having sex all the time"

Thanks for a good analysis and for using the proper Belarusian flag and pronunciation of the language name! Вялікі дзякуй!

Thank you for posting this. Yes, you're right, the languages are pretty close and they're mutually intelligible to great extent. But there's a belief that a Belarusian/Ukrainian speaker can skip any training at all in order to understand Ukrainian/Belarusian without any problems. This is generally not quite true, IMO. One reason was mentioned by you: false friends. There are quite a lot of words in both languages which sound or written very similar, but mean something different (sometimes absolutely different things :) For example: in Ukrainian "тривога лунає", in Belarusian "сцяг лунае" (alarm sounds/flag is waving, resp., would be "трывога гучыць"/"прапор майорить"), смуга/смуга - stripe/fog, drizzle, to name a few. And, ofc. шмат vs шмат :) Some language cliches/expressions are different. This is what's meant by usus. As for me, it was a bit challenging to get used to Ukrainian on TV. They speak quite fast and I barely understood anything :) But eventually I started to understand it just as fine as Belarusian. I think the converse would be true for a Ukrainian. Another funny thing I noticed, many of my Ukrainian friends have difficult time understanding written Belarusian. It looks like I understand them much, much better. Maybe because of kinda pre-training, in fact. Oh yeah, last but not least, I still find it challenging speaking Ukrainian, actually :) It's not so easy to get rid of Belarusian accent. Ukrainian phonotactics is different after all. But still I love Ukrainian very much.

Дзякуй за ваша відэа. Вельмі цікава яго было глядзець. ❤❤❤

Не маю потреби вчити білоруську ...бо знаю українську та польску--то рідні мови.......тому і білоруська --рідна..Все на 100 % зрозуміло....😊❤

Thank you for the really quality content. Бажаю наснаги!

Can't say I ever tried to learn to spek either one but I do sometimes listen to them and try to understand what's being said. Last time I watched a video in Belarusian I got recommended a yt channel called "Купалаўцы" which apparently belongs to a theatrical group performing in Belarusian.

Omg, Ukrainian sounding like French sounds so fun

This is top stuff how does it have so little views?

As I was mostly exposed to them in spoken form, the spoken form is easier. I've never really learned them, but my knowledge of Polish and Russian helped a lot at the start, and then I just figured out (or sometimes checked in dictionaries) the meaning of some less obvious words.

Immediate like and subscription cause using our original Belarusian flag

2:02 There are actually 2 letters with different sounds, the second one being Гг - [ɦ] in Ukrainian and [ɣ] in Belarusian. I guess you could also include the fact that Шш, Жж, Чч have slightly different pronunciations (these are rather similar, though) - [ʃ] [ʒ] [tʃ] for Ukrainian, but [ʂ] [ʐ] [tʂ] for Belarusian, respectively. Also, Вв is always pronounced [v] in Belarusian, but varies in Ukrainian depending on dialect and placement [v~β~ʋ~w~u̯].

Thank you for using the flag of Democratic Belarus and the rightful territorial map of Ukraine! I commend your efforts in doing these wonderful videos. I learn a lot from your videos, and I hope that your channel grows.

Дзякуй за гэта цудоўнае відэа!

Great video! 9: 24 What did you mean by "Travellers are moving all the time"? The Ukrainian translation is grammatically correct, but sounds funny to me :)

I like you. And how you use slavik endings in terms

8:01: Belarusian Classical Orthography, or Taraškievica, as opposed to the russified Belarusian Official Orthography, also has the Vocative case. Therefore, we can say that Ukrainian and Belarusian both have seven cases. 9:17: Yes, the simple form of the Imperfective future is also commonly used in Belarusian Classical Orthography. 10:30 1. Yes, I know both Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. 2. For me personally, before I started learning Belarusian, it was completely clear to me what was written and what was spoken. I can also say that my relatives understand it by 95%, even though they do not know Belarusian. They were previously shocked by the similarity between Ukrainian and Belarusian. Thank you for this great video!

Your pronunciation is crazy! Вітаю з України, ды Жыве Беларусь!

Аs a speaker of ukrainian language, I can say that it is sometimes even hard to distinguish these two languages for the first few seconds of a pearson speaking. So it is muck more mutually understandable in a spoken form. Also it is very hard to find ane Belorussian speakers, cuz majority of their young speaks only russian. It is a result of a rusification policy, Ukraine suffered from it too in a soviet times.

Thank you for your work! Just here is some correction: pyska (not myska) = muzzle

Native Ukrainian speaker. I understand 90% of Belarusian, and that's only because I rarely meet it somewhere, so I don't have practice. I think that I understand spoken language better, although the written form does not cause any real difficulties.

The video is great. But it is probably too early to say (on 2:37) that Belarusian and Ukrainian are not partially but completely or well intellgible without the previous exposure. It is because today's their level of the mutual intelligibility are not innate and natural. Although Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest in the lexical similarity (cognates and partial cognates which are without “indirect common origin” and are without so-called “irregular” sound changes in their roots and only in affixes), the contemporary extremely high level of the intelligibility of Belarusian by Ukrainians are explained, obviously by exposure to Russian. Especially it’s true about the spoken Belarusian. It is because some common Ukrainian-Russian-Belarusian cognates sound in Belarusian more like the sound in Russian. So, Belarusian and Russian have word “кот” (cat, or male cat). But Ukrainian has the word “кіт”. Here are enough big difference in sound and it may make intelligibility development slower and its percentage would be something smaller. But even without exposure to Russian, Belarusian would be the most intelligible language to all Ukrainians. But (as some German linguists researched in the text of the Aesop story "The North wind and the Sun"), naturally so- called phonetic and orthographic "Word adaptation surprisal) between different kinds Belarusian and Ukrainian common vocabulary are more distant than between those between Czech and Slovak. Sure, they are less distant than between them from one hand and the Russian or Polish "similar" words on the hand. Still, (according to these linguists) some common vocabulary are more similar written form (concerning Normalized Levenshtein distance as welk as Word adaptationak surprisal) between from Russian and Ukrainian than Belarusian and Ukrainian (Ru "ходить", UA "ходити", but Bel "хадзіць"). According to the German scientists' results, un the natural conditions it would be even something easier and bigger to understand Ukrainian (both in writtencand spoken form) by Belarusians and nit vice-versa. In today's conditions (with knowledge of Russian by both nations) Belarusians withoutany exposure probably understand more easily written Ukrainian than Ukrainians understand written Belarusian. And concerning the spoken Ukrainian and Belarusian the situation is opposite.

Ukrainian is my native language and I understand Belarussian quite well. Don’t know if that’s the case nowadays, but in my previous interactions with Belarussians, I got an impression that using Belarussian isn’t very en vogue nowadays, which is a real shame! Correct me if I’m wrong though. Would like to hear from you.

It's interesting that some words for technical stuff (like for railway for example) in Ukrainian are very close to Czech or Slovak words, isn't it somehow related to the fact that little part of today Ukraine was part of Czechoslovakia after 1918 when railway probably spreaded there? Probably not, but these things are very interesting. 🙂

Як українець я добре розумію білоруську, але деякі слова доводиться ґуґлити, якщо чую вперше. Читати теж можу, але досить повільно. Сам говорити не можу, треба вчити. Та це не обов'язкого, у спілкуванні з білорусами кожен говорить своєю мовою. Єдине, що більшість білорусів уже не говорить білоруською через жорстку русифікацію. Російськомовні білоруси нас майже не розуміють, деякі не відрізняють білоруську від української. Це сумно.

Would be interesting to see a similar video about English and German languages:)

7:19 BTW where does this phrase about Maria come from?

"To be" is not omitted. In written language, it is possible to connect two parts of a sentence with a dash, a colon or a semi-colon. There's a whole bunch of rules about it. In this particular case, the dash literally means "is" (BY - гэта), (UA - це). In spoken language we usually keep "to be" in place.

дякую за відео!

I'm polish, and "herbata" means "tea", but "garbata" means hunchback", but only when referring to a woman, for a man it is "garbaty", so it's not completely false friends 😀

The biggest problem with Belarusian for me is not to stumble over their A where I expect O in texts. That's what makes it hard to read fluently. When I see let's say ‘гадзіна’ I may think of it as our ‘га́дина’ (Serpent/Bad person) while it actually was our ‘годи́на’ (Hour). In spoken language it's easier because you hear where the stress is and it helps a lot. As for understanding I don't remember any problems, all you need is to know such often words as ‘apošni’ or ‘mienavita’ 😂

One correction. Railroad in Belarusian is čyhunka (чыгунка). The speaker pronounces čuhunka, its archaic/dialectical. For the rest the video is correct and presents a good deep insight into Belarusian.

Білоруську дуже легко розуміти на слух, письмову трохи важче, особливо якщо використовується латинська абетка.

Carpathian Rusyn would have made this even more interesting - while technically dialectical with Ukrainian it retains archaic features also present in Polish making it even more lexically similar to Polish than Belarusian afaik.

Actually, all "false friends" are included in this 16 % Belarusian-Ukrainian lexical distance (if they are really of common origin) . The words with occasional similarity in spelling or sound and without common root and with different meanings are not necessary different vocabulary. E.g. Ukrainian "горбата" (hunchback), which has different root and meaning to its Belarusian similarly sounded counterpart and this Belarusian "гaрбата" (tea) are reallydifferent vocabular. But Belarusian "гарбата" in hunchback" has common root and meaning and is common vocabulary to the Ukrainian "горбата". In the same time Belarussian "дзівіцца" in the meaning "to gaze" (which has common root to its Ukrainian counterpart "дивитися") is always different vocabulary to the Ukrainian "дивитися" (to see). It is also true about the partially overlapped "false friends" like Ukrainian "північ" but only when they have not overlapped meaning. They are compared like different words then. The example of this are Ukrainian words "північ 1" - "midnight"- which is common vocabulary to the Standard Russian "полночь", and "північ 2" (North), which is always different vocabulary concerning this contemporary Standard Russian "полночь".

Great video. It's quite interesting how you can definitely tell Belarusian has more similar features to Polish like pronunciation BUT from the examples in the video Ukrainian has a lot of similar words itself to Polish. Plus Ukrainian also uses the Vocative case like Polish.

Uktainian is my mother language and I never studied Belarusian but understand anything in it, I can read, listen understanding all save some words sometimes. Therefore I wonder very much that only 84 % of vocabulary coinside.

I'm Ukrainian, and I can understand Belarusian very well. However, I don't always manage to reproduce Belarusian pronunciation without practice. So, for me, the most difficult part of learning Belarusian is the phonetics. I love to hear Belarusian and wish for it to take its rightful place in Belarusian society. Unfortunately, the pro-Kremlin regime there only continues the policy of Russification. Живє Білорусь!

Thanks a lot for your deep interest to our languages

Circa 1976, as the head of a sentry unit (Soviet Army), I was traveling on a train past a nondescript Belarusian village. For some reason, the train stopped for a couple of hours next to the village, and one of my soldiers and I went to the village just a few hundred yards away in hope to procure some viands for the team. On the porch of the very first house we came across, an elderly woman (seemingly in her seventies) was sitting. I greeted her and asked where we could find a grocery store but she seemed to understand my (natively spoken) Russian poorly and replied in a language that I first thought was Ukrainian. So, I switched to Ukrainian, and only after a couple of sentences realized that she was speaking Belarusian. It was the first time for me, a native Ukrainian speaker, to encounter authentic Belarusian speech, and I was surprised to discover that while speaking two different languages, we nonetheless were totally mutually intelligible. I'd say that it's much simpler for me to understand spoken Belarusian than read a Belarusian text. (With Polish and Czech, it's the other way around.)

Я Беларус. В детстве у меня дома установили спутниковую тарелку для телевидения, на котором большая часть интересных каналов была на Украинском. Сразу беглый разговор вообще был непонятен. Через две недели я уже понимал абсолютно все, может за исключением очень редких слов. Просто нужно было привыкнуть к немного другому звучанию. Был на море и даже, хоть и медленно, но разговаривал с Украинцами на их языке. Сейчас спокойно на слух понимаю речь, что на русском, что на белорусском, что на украинском. Говорить бегло, как на русском, только что не могу по украински, но тоже самое и с белорусским языком, т к у нас на нем никто не общается. Только русский либо трасянка - это смесь русского с белорусским. Но это в основном русские слова с белорусским произношением.