Life / To all of you who are Polish - where did you learn English? [64]

I picked up English at around age 2 or so from a couple of my dad's graduate students in Vienna. (he was a visiting scholar teaching some seminar in linguistics at the time) In addition to that, my dad had a decent grasp of English, so we ended up speaking it on occasion when not speaking Polish or German.

Life / Asian and Polish culture - how do they compare? [24]


They do. The Poles, having fought the Turks and Tatars over and over for a few centuries, picked up quite a few Ottoman and Central Asian styles.

News / Kids of the Polish immigrants returning to Poland: New Polish Generation? [15]

As someone who was born in Poland but who left at a very young age, I think it's pretty unlikely to happen. The sad fact is that the long Communist period pretty much left Poland a ruined country. I'm not referring to things such as pollution, architecture or infrastructure, all of which are relatively easy to eliminate or replace with enough money, but rather, Polish culture itself.

Corruption and cronyism has become so ingrained in Polish political and business culture that I find it extremely unlikely that Poland's going to get anything resembling a stable, competent government for the better part of a generation. Couple this with the advantages that educated Poles have in the more developed EU countries (assuming that they have proper local accreditation, which can be gotten with some work), and I just don't think that investing in Poland is going to be a winning proposition for a good 30 or 40 years.