Eschewing the phoentic transcription that uses diacritical marks and using only popular phonetics, would you transcribe the pronunciation of pączki for the benefit of non-Polish-speaking Anglophones as PONCH-key, PUNCH-key or PAUNCH-key?
The choice largely depends on the English speech of the recipient.
For instance, if for an American you transcribe the Polłish word for cat as "kot", he may end up pronouncing it "kaht", so something like "kawt" might be preferable.
The most difficult is approximating ś and ć as opposed to sz and cz. In English both are popularly transcribed as sh and ch.
Any suggestions on this?
POHNCH-kee (for many, maybe most Americans, aw or au will not produce the right result, the difference between cot and caught is disappearing in most of NAmerica).
This can work for Americans, but I don't know if it would work for British people.
Polish vowels
a = ah
e = eh
i = ee
o = oh
u = oo
y = ih
ą = ohn (ohm, ong, word finally maybe onh)
ę = ehn, (ehm, eng, if you want to use the old-fashioned word final, then maybe eh-oo (the oo after e is more distinctive than the nasalization).
before vowels
ci = chee
cie = chyeh
etc
czy = chih
cze = cheh
etc
chih roh-ZOO-myehsh?
At the end of a word or before a consonant, there's no realistic way of distinguishing them (as in wieś and wiesz) without diacritics or detailed explanation.
Also there's no reason an English speaking learner has to learn to _hear_ the difference (after more than 10 years I still don't hear it even though I understand spoken Polish just fine) as long as they can _produce_ a rough approximation of the difference.
