News / Poland's President-Elect Duda leads in public trust - CBOS poll [185]

@JollyR.
Looks to me at any rate that President Duda's merely trying to cement good relations with Germany, by far, Poland's most important (not to mention economically successful) West European business ally!

Whether or not he's trying to suck up to Merkel and Gauck is an entirely separate matter, I think. I follow the German press fairly closely and am lead to believe that right now Germany needs all the allies she can possibly get in order to become more multiculturally self sufficient.

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Maybe HE finds it easier to speak English than Polish. However, do native English speakers necessarily agree?
:-)

Guess they do.

Furthermore, Poles often seem to have difficulties telling the continuous from the simple tense(s), not to mention the distinction in English between statement vs. question word order, for example,"Mark, why you are speaking Polish?" cf. "Mark, why DO you SPEAK Polish?" etc...

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Appreciate the correction, rozumiemnic! I was only trying to be politeLOL

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

@xerxes88,

You've just touched on my Achilles Heel regarding this aggravating tendency, not only of Poles but other Europeans as well,
to try switching to a language not generally familiar or even comfortable for them (in this case, English), laboring under the erroneous notion that they are actually doing us a favor!!

My advice is simply to continue speaking Polish, good, bad, or indifferent, and to blazes with their often paltry attempts to "make things easier for you", usually having the reverse effect of making things harder, since, in my experience, I scarcely could understand their English:-)

Persevere ol' chum and remember the famous saying, "Illegitimis non carborundum est!", i.e. "Don't let the buggers get you down!"

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

When many Poles speak English, I've noticed almost a "squelched"-sounding pronunciation of certain vowel combinations, e.g. the "-or" in words such as "performance" etc... creating something akin to "perFERmance", thus lending a somewhat jerking, chirping quality to the speech!

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Pronunciation's a whole 'nother kettle of fish though, jon! As Polish has no schwa sounds, zero difference between long and short vowels and varying consonental quality compared with English, this makes getting rid of a native Polish accent (at least over the age of eight or nine) nearly impossible!

:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Two British schoolboys:

Bobby: What's the meaning of "Jew"?
Jimmy: "Jew"?? Oh, I feel the "Jew" (dialect pronunciation of "dew") on the grass every morning!

:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Poles to whom I've taught English struggle conversely like the Dickens with our tenses, e.g. past perfect vs. past perfect progressive etc... The distinctions seem to practically glance off of them like bullets off of Superman:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

A more common error in which the simple past is unequivocally correct is for example "I have written to my cousin before." as opposed to the proper "I wrote to my cousin..." which clearly signifies an action completed within the most recent past (for which the simple past is the intended tense)!

Polish has far fewer tenses than, say, English or French. For that they compensate with an abundance of prefixed verbs and their myriad aspectual distinctions, e.g.

"mieszkać" vs."POmieszkać" or even "ZAmieszkać" etc....

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Many foreigners learning English, including a lot of Poles along with others, will typically say "I have eaten lunch today..." vs. "I had aka "ate" lunch today...":-)

I think that natural idiomatic usage in any language is the slipperiest slope for those learning a foreign language.

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Yes, I agree Ziemowit! But the article seems to confound them on a regular basis:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

"I choose to not run." is a split infinitive, ol' buddy, and DEAD WRONG, I don't care which playbook:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

"Have you" is entirely CORRECT, in fact, there's an old English-language anecdote regarding one of our presidents, Calvin Coolidge, who, when asked if he was running for a second term, replied "I do not choose to run." Grammatically, this is wrong, because in fact he is CHOOSING not to run. What he meant was (the grammatically proper) "I choose not to run.", since he of course DID already make a choice, namely, not to run a second time as president:-)

Poles though, I've noticed, tend to respond slightly better to English correction by foreigners than, say, the Germans or even the French!

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

Or how about the difference in "English" between British "I have been to the museum today." vs. American "I was at the museum today", or, "Have you...? vs. "Do you have....?"

Drives foreigners nuts 'cuz English is such a pluracentric language!!
:-)

UK, Ireland / Common pitfalls for Poles learning English [187]

@InPolska,

I agree one-hundred percent! So often Poles for instance will misinterpret a harmless, figurative utterance in English and take it literally!
An example I posted once previously concerned a young Polish acquaintance who responded to our remark about her daughter that the latter had grown since our last get together, with some annoyance, replying "Well, she certainly hasn't gotten any smaller!"

This is but one of numerous petty examples of "understanding" the text, but not the culturally-imbued "meaning" of a second language, no matter how, grammatically correct, accent-free and American style it may well sound:-)

Po polsku / Dlaczego uczysz się Polskiego? [101]

Jeszcze nie się zgadzam z Tobą, Wulkan:-) "Poszłem" jest błędne!! "Have got to" jest poprawny angielski. "Gonna" NIE jest poprawny, choć to bardzo zwykle. Wreszczie zrozumiesz o którym to chodzi?

Przepraszem, tu jest MOIM błędem. "....o CO to chodzi"
LOL

Po polsku / Dlaczego uczysz się Polskiego? [101]

To jest moIM językIEM ojczystyM.

Przepraszam, Wulkanie! Także wielu Polaków pisze czyli mówi n.p "poszłem", a nie (poprawnie) "poszed£EM". itd..

Prawdopodbnie jak Polak to było po prosto błądem typograficznym:-)

Prawda?
LOL

Po polsku / Dlaczego uczysz się Polskiego? [101]

Dlaczego, Wulkan? On po prosto chce zaczwicić swoje znajomości polskiego, nie więcej:-) Wolność słowa także jest wolnością głupstwa, prawda?

Po polsku / Dlaczego uczysz się Polskiego? [101]

Skąd jesteś, blue222? Jesteś urodzonymTurkiem?

News / Polish-foreigner marriages increasing [48]

OK, in brief then, wjtk, you're simply saying that there's a shortage of (elligible) Polish males per every Polish female. Is that it?

News / Polish-foreigner marriages increasing [48]

It remains a truism that if a foreigner marries a Pole and the couple decides to live in Poland as opposed to the foreigner's home country, chances are the language spoken at home would NOT be that of the native-born spouse:-)

News / Polish-foreigner marriages increasing [48]

Point of fact is that Poland remains a more or less ethnically homogeneous nation, where nearly the entire population can trace their ancestors to Slavic roots!

News / Polish-foreigner marriages increasing [48]

Intermarriage may be common, it is doubtful though whether or not it necessarily will culturally strengthen or weaken the host country:-)

News / Polish-foreigner marriages increasing [48]

Often, the foreign-born spouse will speak to his/her mate in the foreign-born partner's source language. Even more often however, imagine the Italian-born wife, for instance, of a Polish man (as well as vice-versa) speaking to their non-native English speaking partner in ENGLISH, rather than Italian or Polish, the native language of the person who's intermarried into the host culture:-)

I can't even think of the chaos that must resultLOL It would be like the blind leading the blind, even if both partners (think that they!!!) know English more or less fluently.

News / New constitution In Poland? [57]

Judicial appointments everywhere are political appointments, end of statement! A candidate has to be already politically connected before he or she can even consider reaching within spitting distance of the position:-) Smarts are fine and good, but they matter barely a scintilla in the grand scheme of things.

An old proverb: "It's not what you know, it's who(m) you know. If you don't know anybody, nobody knows you either. And if they don't know ya, they don't owe ya!"

LOL

History / Restitution Sought by US Holocaust Survivor Family of Expropriated Property in Zywiec, Poland [24]

Acquisitions from permanent foreign collections, typically funded by the government, e.g. the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Louvre etc. such as the Mona Lisa on "indefinite loan" from its original resting place in Italy, is a far cry from what the Germans call "Raubkunst" or "pilfered art", predatorily rested from the hands of its original owner, typically a Jewish individual, and then taken into a private collection by someone of "Aryan" descent!!

Typically, Poland was occupied, the nationalized, much, much later privatized, in order to reap the benefits the Polish State felt was appropriate:-)

"Ownership" in the strictest legal sense is a contractual obligation between two consenting persons. If what passed for legal during the Third Reich, let along what passed for justice throughout occupied Europe, was the porousness of any contract between an Aryan and a Jew (according to the Nuremberg Laws), the fact that Jews were no longer German or for that matter Polish citizens between 1935-1944, merely exacerbates any serious attempts to prove that restitution is even justified, much less within the pervue of the law:-)

History / Restitution Sought by US Holocaust Survivor Family of Expropriated Property in Zywiec, Poland [24]

Hey guys!

Just to follow up with yesterday's post, it turns out (get this one!!) that the survivor's family WON in a Polish Appeal's Court, but it was then flatly rejected by the government. Apparently, as in Germany particularly, the Sejm concluded that the continued pay out of compensation claims (both real and spurious) would simply bankrupt the Polish State. Therefore, noone can expect much action on this.

In fifteen to twenty years hence?? Who's to say?

Life / Catholic idol worship in Poland [29]

The difference according to my understanding between Catholics and Protestants is that observant Catholics follow the absolute letter of the New Testament faithfully and completely, whereas the Protestants view Church ritual, e.g. taking the sacrament at Holy Communion as purely a historical "reenactment" of the body and blood of Christ as opposed to physically ingesting the actual body and blood of Christ. Among the staunchest Protestant denominations here in the States are said to be the Methodists! Many strict Methodists, I've been told, don't even follow Lent, believing they have nothing to give up, in addition, look down on the Catholics as mere "Papists" and their religion as a lot of mumbo-jumbo, full of outdated and primitive ritual symbolism.

History / Restitution Sought by US Holocaust Survivor Family of Expropriated Property in Zywiec, Poland [24]

Certainly, not every restitution claims case will be identical! As far as I'm aware, this woman's family were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and sojourned to the United States. They hailed from, or at least, had lived in -ywiec and held certain property there. I'd have to read more on the case in order to post a more substantive message and/or rebuttal to counter claimants' positions that actually the present government of Poland doesn't owe them one thin złoty:-)

History / Restitution Sought by US Holocaust Survivor Family of Expropriated Property in Zywiec, Poland [24]

How right you are! And yes, there's plenty of scammers out there to keep both the Polish as well as the US and German courts mighty busy for years to come.