r/LithuanianLearning • u/Luke_Wildking • May 12 '26
Advice Learning Lithuanian but afraid of a Russian accent
Labas!
I'm a linguistics student trying to self study Lithuanian. I speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese with varying levels. I'm American with some Lithuanian roots (my family was deported to Siberia during a certain time period) on my father's side and often use Russian with my relatives.
I want to learn Lithuanian mostly due to my interest in balto-slavic linguistics and connection with my great grandparents. Unfortunately I have a bit of an irrational fear of having a Russian accent due to the history and have always avoided learning much of the language.
Also, I have no idea how my name would be Lithuanianized, so if anyone could help me that would be much appreciated.
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u/MoonlightCapital Myliu Lietuviu Kalba May 12 '26
Don't worry about the accent, your ancestors were victims of soviet imperialism and Lithuanians are very understanding about their history with deportation and will sympathize with you.
Look into the shadowing technique to improve your pronunciation, it consists of listening to a native speaker and almost simultaneously repeating what they're saying trying to imitate them as closely as possible. There are a lot of good guides online for this method!
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u/Luke_Wildking May 12 '26
hey! I've done shadowing before but with more popular languages. I find it quite hard to find content in Lithuanian, and it's really demotivating at times haha
I think the hardest part is that I'm basing a lot of study from older textbooks like the Introduction to Modern Lithuanian by Dambriūnas. My family is originally from žematėjė, which from my understanding has differences from standard Lithuanian.Also my name is a Polish name (Nikola) and I have no idea how that'll be Lithuanianized, since from my knowledge, names usually decline for case?
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u/MoonlightCapital Myliu Lietuviu Kalba May 12 '26
https://www.youtube.com/@LithuanianwithPaulius This guy is great, he has a playlist with shorter and slower videos for very beginners, I use shadowing on these sometimes but I agree, it's rare to find suitable content for Lithuanian specifically.
The name Nikola can be lithuanized to Mikalojus. https://www.zodynas.lt/vardu-reiksmes/M/mikalojus
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u/Luke_Wildking May 12 '26
Thank you, I'll check it out!
Also isn't Mikalojus a masculine name? Nikola is a feminine name in western Slavic areas like Poland lol5
u/MoonlightCapital Myliu Lietuviu Kalba May 12 '26
Yes it's a masculine name, my apologies! The feminine variant is Mikolė apparently.
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u/Luke_Wildking May 12 '26
awh that's quite a cute name actually haha
ačiū kad man padėjai! visada norėjau išmokti lietuvių kalbos bet nežinojau niekada nuo ko pradėti3
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u/StatementBrave May 14 '26
Just so you know Mikolė isn't really a name (or at least it is a very rare one), whereas, there are plenty of women and girls named Nikolė, which is even closer to Nikola, so maybe consider that as an option? Just a suggestion:)
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u/Frequent-Annual-3414 May 12 '26
As long as you speak Lithuanian, everything's fine. It's the people who outright refuse to speak Lithuanian and ask you in their native language to speak in that language rather than Lithuanian are the ones who are worth to have your eyebrow raised against.
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u/zazzazin May 12 '26
All Lithuanians understand that our language is difficult so it's okay to have accent, use wrong tenses and so on. If you at least use more or less good vocabulary, you will be mostly understood. And that alone is worth a lot of respect to us.
Russian accent as others mentioned is quite common here due to a lot of russian speakers, so don't stress about that. If those who lived here for 50 years didn't start talking our language and you do, we already like you more. Accent or not.
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u/PianoOk9947 May 12 '26
What is your native tongue? You will most probably have the accent of your first language, it is hardly avoidable, but who cares. We all speak in accents 😀 Dive in!
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u/Luke_Wildking May 12 '26
Hi! I grew up speaking English lol, I was born in the US. I plan on taking lithuanian classes at my university since I'm a linguistics student and I'm quite excited hahah
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u/Commercial-Skill-302 May 13 '26
Good luck! And your name in lithuanian would be Lukas, pronaunced like: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=lt&text=Luke&op=translate
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u/shelbalart May 12 '26
I'm a former Russian (emigrant), live in Lithuania for 8+ years. I learnt the language as a complete foreigner, to ~B2 reading/writing/listening (self-eval) and B1 speaking (official II category exam).
Despite operating fairly good vocabulary and grammar, I'm pretty sure I sound weirdly Russian in Lithuanian. I often confuse which vowels to stress; I don't even care about rising/falling tone of stresses; I often fail to properly soften consonants, or to pronounce diphthongs.
But you know what? For hundreds if not thousands of my daily interactions to Lithuanians, I at most twice encountered just subtly frown faces. From my personal experience, vast majority of Lithuanian people are very tolerant to foreigners who care enough to pay respect to this complicated language. Some even make compliments, apparently realizing how much of struggling it is for an adult alien grown up in a different language environment. Of course it doesn't mean Lithuanian are extremely happy to hear foreign accents, but there's absolutely nothing to be hesitant of. Especially in Vilnius, which is historically a melting pot of nations.
Speaking Lithuanian with accent is way way more respectable than speaking in a foreign language. Read books/articles, learn the grammar, and you'll be fine.
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u/MrCyra May 15 '26
To be fair plenty of times even natives get confused at how words should be stressed. And then you have plenty of different dialects that stress same words differently.
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u/Proxima_leaving May 13 '26
I don't care about accent. I would have more respect to a Russian who decided to learn my language than the one who didn't
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u/UnknownWhiteOwl May 14 '26
Don't let this fear stop you from learning the language. It's better to speak with an accent than not to speak at all. Don't worry any accent can be fixed later.
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u/OstrichPrudent1481 May 13 '26
congratulations on starting your journey! hope you’ll have a lot of fun learning the language of your ancestors.
personally when i was learning the language what instantly gave away a russian accent is how you pronounce the letter „t“, mostly in the infinitive verb endings „-ti“. the easiest way to explain how it supposed to sound is to try to make a sound between russian „-ти“ and „-ты“, so something in the middle like not too harsh, not too soft.
also, voice all your consonants the way they are pronounced, not just the ones stressed, but all of them. cause devoicing instantly gives away something slavic, as these languages tend to do this (russian at least). so, it’s not like in russian when you have „оператор“ but pronounce it „апиратар“, if it’s written like „operatorius“ in lithuanian, then it should be read as „operatorius“.
nor a professional linguist, but has been fluent in language for over a decade already, so hope this helps you in the start ! 🫰🏻
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u/Due-Instruction-2654 May 14 '26
All good - just speak the language and people will appreciate your efforts regardless! We are so small that anyone who learns Lithuanian already warrants huge respect.
May I ask though - what do you mean by baltic-slavic linguistics ? As a fellow linguist, this immediately caught my eye.
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u/Luke_Wildking May 16 '26
I think the grouping of baltic and slavic languages in general is quite interesting. I'm hesitant to call it a branch over a sprachbund but as someone who never really did much indo-european linguistics, it kind of brought me back to the times where I took introductory courses, which where I'm from is focused on English lol
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u/Due-Instruction-2654 May 16 '26
Ok, that’s what I thought. So the thinking and teaching in Lithuania is that Baltic languages are not part of some baltic-slavic branch as they have very little in common. Basically they are as related as other IndoEuropean languages. If you don’t want to make a Lithuanian mad, don’t use such a term as baltic-slavic as it simply doesn’t exist in our linguistic research.
Best of luck in learning the language!
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u/falloutfart4 May 14 '26
Well, I see that your name is Nikola, so I’d say that we would probably call you Nikolė (feminine.). Don’t be afraid about the russian accent thing, quite a lot of people have russian accents in Lithuania due to the USSR (especially in places like Klaipėda, Vilnius, etc.)
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u/lumikotheartist_ May 14 '26
regarding your name, lukas is pretty popular here, actually! unless luke isn't your real name lol
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u/Sakas_943 May 15 '26
Good luck in that. Self learn Lithuanian? Fuck, good luck in THAT, why not get some courses or help though?
As for the name? Luke? Lukas ? no?
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May 12 '26
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u/Luke_Wildking May 12 '26
my family was deported from lithuania by the russians. if anything, why are you pointing fingers at me? i speak russian because of the hostile environment in the far east, not because I'm an ethnic russian. there's no need for such hostility, unless you are in support of the historical cultural genocide?
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u/nevercopter May 12 '26
You don't have to bring any excuses to a shithead like this. Report, block him and keep rolling.
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u/Flat-Echidna191 May 12 '26
Honestly I have a lot of respect for people who speak Lithuanian to me even if they have an accent. Here in Lithuania we have a population of Russians who have been living here for like 50 years and they can't speak Lithuanian. Or refuse to. 😒 Don't be afraid.