USA, Canada / Polish or American Education? [180]


Superior to what? European ones? You didn't demonstrate anything of the kind. In fact you said:

"I honestly think if someone's going for sheer knowledge and to learn as much as they can, they'd probably be better off in a European University where education is far more comprehensive and there's way more time spent on teaching, studying, etc"

The top universities in America are certainly equal to the top European ones. But when you start to look at which unis are best for which subjects, for technology and engineering for example, America occupies only the top two spots in the top ten QS rankings. The remainder are in Europe and the Far East.


I really am not prepared to spend time or energy explaining to you, nor do I have the patience. You can spend some time reading a few articles on the importance to a person's future, of a good foundation at primary, secondary and especially pre-school level.

USA, Canada / Polish or American Education? [180]

[moved from]


OUR schools?? I thought you were Polish :)) In the UN education index Ireland ranks 11 only five places behind America and well ahead of Poland who come in at number 35. 'School' for Europeans means primary and secondary, not university. Once again you show how much of an Amrerican you are. You neither think nor talk like a European. Anyway we already had the debate about the woeful American education system that turns out semi-educated secondary school students.

And civil wars are frequently about territory. The Trojan war is a myth by the way, not historical fact.

Work / I want to teach English in Poland and I don't know where to start! PLEASE HELP! [23]

Don't want to be a Negative Nellie but Krosno is tiny, population less than 50,000 people. Very limited job opportunities, even working with children. It's not likely there will be any international schools there and teaching English in a state school will be a few hours a week probably at very low pay - if they need your services. They often don't think it's necessary to have a native speaker and a class teacher will teach her own class with whatever limited English she has, thus even in Warsaw I encounter primary school age kids who greet me with Good Morning in the middle of the afternoon. That's a Polish thing, thinking that Good Morning is the equivalent of Dzień Dobry and can be used at any time during daylight hours. These are children who are learning English in school so that gives you an idea.

I took a quick look and there is a Helen Doron pre-school in Krosno. They teach through English, but Liseczka, you really need to be trained in early years education to work with under-sixes.

However, far more interesting for you, is that there is a state college located in Krosno for training English teachers. They probably send their students to the local schools for teaching practice. This means the schools are already getting English teaching services for free and are not likely to want to pay you for what they regard as the same thing. But on the plus side, if you get the B Ed there might be a job opportunity for you teaching in the college.

pwsz.krosno.pl/about-us-department-of-english/

If you click on the link to 'staff' you'll see there are a couple of native English speakers and there are email links for them. It might be an idea to contact one of them and ask their advice re training and job opportunities in the town.

Work / I want to teach English in Poland and I don't know where to start! PLEASE HELP! [23]


That's two very different types of student and two very different types of teaching. I'm wondering what the rationale is behind it. Do you feel drawn more to one than the other and if so why? Don't make the mistake of thinking that small children are easier to teach, they're not, if anything they can be far more challenging as they grasp concepts completely differently. You need solid training in early years education to deal professionally with pre-schoolers.

One thing you should be clear about is that teaching in Polish public schools is not at all well paid so you should be looking at private establishments.

However as Delph points out there are opportunities in private, international schools at every level from kindergarten/pre-school up. He is also right that as you are planning on moving to Poland permanently you should invest your time and money in getting general teaching qualifications that will form a strong base for a decent career in the education sector in Poland.

One thing to consider is where in Poland you'll be moving to, If it's a rural area or small village/town then you might have to re-think your plans and go the online teaching route, but good qualifications are always worth having.

I see a problem though with your timing, as the next academic year starts in Sep 2018. You might be too late to apply for this year and a B Ed would take three years to complete but if you can start in Sep, you'd finish in the summer of 2021 which should be ok.

Work / Job offer in Lodz, gross 1000€/4260PLN. Apartment and healthcare paid for. Good in Poland? [46]

Yes that's how it is in Ireland too. You can buy a whole sheep or pig for example. You order it from the farmer in advance but you can only have it when he's scheduled to take a few to slaughter. Basically he reserves one for you. When you go to collect it, it'll be all butchered and cut up into the various chops, joints etc. There are a few farmers who do that as a regular business and sell the meat direct to buyers in small quantities but otherwise it's generally only done if you live locally and the farmer will do it as a casual thing for a neighbour who wants a whole animal for the freezer as their meat supply for the year. It's only pigs and sheep though. With Irish beef, we let it hang for up to a month after slaughter before it's butchered. It depends on the breed, but you'd have a long wait for your meat. Mind you I doubt many people could fit a whole cow in their freezer. On average you get around 400kg of meat from a carcass!

However, as you say, be it Ireland or Poland,that's no use to someone who lives in a small flat and just wants a chop for their dinner :) Not that you'll get a decent chop in Poland or a steak either if it comes to that because they butcher the animals differently. I wonder how they do it in Sweden. Maybe Mike will return and let us know.

Work / Job offer in Lodz, gross 1000€/4260PLN. Apartment and healthcare paid for. Good in Poland? [46]


There are certainly meat shops in Warsaw but I once saw a delivery being made to the local Bazaar and they were bringing in huge slabs of frozen meat!! So obviously they intended to defrost it and then cut it up, not a very nice thought, buying defrosted meat. Also much of the wędliny for sale is just the branded stuff taken out of the packaging and put out on the counter. If it's 'domowa' (homemade, Mike) they usually specify but it can be very salty. I find Polish duck very good, not so fatty as Irish and much more meat on it. Naturally being Irish I compare all meat with Irish!

Oh and another to watch out for, if you're buying minced/ground meat, it may have salt added. Check the labels if you buy it pre-packed. It's often sold as being for 'kotlety' and in that case it frequently comes with salt. If possible as Maf says, go to a small shop and buy a piece of meat and ask them to mince it for you. They'll do that. You can also get a leaner, better quality cut that way.

Work / Job offer in Lodz, gross 1000€/4260PLN. Apartment and healthcare paid for. Good in Poland? [46]

You can get organic meat sometimes in the supermarket, though not often. Your best bet is some organic market type place. There are a lot of outdoor markets in Poland, called Targi or Bazaar but they're not organic. Some of the stuff is homegrown/homemade but a lot of it is just bought at a wholesalers and is the same as the supermarket. If you want organic meat you'll need to go to an organic market 'ekologiczne'. Take a look here, I don't know how genuinely organic it is though:

ekotarg-lodz.pl/

By the way you'll see a lot of mentions of 'wędliny'. That's various kinds of processed meats and sausages which Poles really love and eat loads of. Always check your labels in the supermarket as a lot of food here has high salt content and additives, e numbers etc. Things 'bez konserwantów' means no preservatives.

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

Three of the five appointments were made legitimately by the previous government. The positions became vacant and needed to be filled within the tenure of PO so Duda had no grounds on which to refuse to endorse them. The issue concerns the other two which could be viewed as an attempt by PO to stuff the courts with their own henchmen which is most definitely unconstitutional (and that's what PIS is trying to do now). So Duda was right to refuse to appoint them in my view. As I've said many times Gumi, they're all as bad each other for the most part, though you always get decent individuals even amongst the mayhem, not that I think Duda is either decent or bad. He's just a bit of a non-entity, chosen by JK to do a job for him.

Work / Job offer in Lodz, gross 1000€/4260PLN. Apartment and healthcare paid for. Good in Poland? [46]


Dirk, you forget we've known you here for two years now and remember your first posts, so we know you're a spoofer. At this stage we don't really care any more but it's a different matter when you misrepresent yourself to innocent people who come here looking for sensible, reliable advice. Mind you in this case it's only about the cost of living but for some reason you feel obliged to expand it into a career guidance session which you are ill-placed to be delivering and which I doubt the OP is need of. Somehow your posts always seem to end up being about you and how amazing you are - and as for employing people, I'm afraid that giving some eejit 50 zł for going to the post office and picking up a package from China doesn't really count. Maybe that's why you don't understand how ZUS, tax etc works. Y'all have a nice day now ;)

@Mike, have you looked at Numbeo? You can compare living costs between where you live now and Lodz. It's generally pretty accurate. Also you could take a look at the websites for the major supermarket chains to see what it would be likely to cost you for the weekly shop, Auchan, Carrefour, Biedronka, Lidl, Tesco. Food is comparatively cheap here but the quality varies. Meat is pretty terrible, pumped full of water, the beef has absolutely no flavour but lamb is appearing more on the shelves now and it's ok, pretty expensive at about 60zł per kilo for a leg of Polish lamb and even more for other cuts. But if you buy a leg and roast it in the oven English style, it'll give you meat for four days or so for one person and you can make a nice lamb curry or something. If you can get hold of 'dzik' wild boar or other venison it's very good. They sell it in the supermarkets but again, it's pricey. However it's very lean and not injected with water so a little goes a long way. Milk is pretty woeful here too, very watery and you have to watch out for them adding powdered milk, 'mleko w proszku' to things like Kefir and even supposedly natural yogurt. They use it as a thickening agent.

One thing I would add is the importance of learning some Polish but I suppose the bank will arrange for that :)

Work / Job offer in Lodz, gross 1000€/4260PLN. Apartment and healthcare paid for. Good in Poland? [46]


Dirk, you're misleading the OP as you have spent most of your life since the age of seven living in the USA and have never worked in Poland for a Polish employer. When you described your own career in a previous post you were talking about America which really has no relevance to the OP.

@ Mike, Jon always gives very sound and sensible advice. Take heed of him. Best of luck to you :))

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

Ok, as far as I can see, the appointment of three of the judges by PO was legit as those seats were vacant while PO were still in government. So Duda was out of order in refusing to swear in all five.

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

Gumi the air quality in Poland is the worst in Europe. It's killing Polish people. If Poland wasn't put under pressure by the EU to do something about it, they wouldn't, because the government doesn't give a toss.


Don't know the details of it. Will look into it.

Not being sarcastic, but I think that to comment intelligently on the constittution, one needs to be a fluent Polish speaker and have studied it in its original form, not an English translation. Obviously I can't tick those boxes. Also one needs to have a pretty good knowledge of constitutional law and I can't tick that box either.

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]


Gumi I suspect you're being deliberately obtuse.

@Dirk, I can see you still don't understand how the EU works. Anyway regarding MEP votes, whether they are binding is not important. What matters is the message they send. It's your friends, your colleagues, your allies, your peer group, your community telling you how they feel. If you choose to ignore that, you isolate yourself from valuable contacts and end up being stuck with places like China. However I'm not going to waste my time debating it with you. I can already hear the 'China is awesome, the rest of the world sucks, except maybe for Russia, man, that Putin really has balls' response.

Language / Do English-speakers sound funny when we speak Polish? [49]


Yeah, they should have replied 'You can die free of charge but you'll have to pay your own funeral expenses' :))

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

It's not the Commission telling people what to do. Article 7 etc has come about through the votes of Poland's fellow member states in the European Parliament. The EU is a community and the community doesn't want to have authoritarian regimes as members, which is where Poland seemed to be heading.

Language / Do English-speakers sound funny when we speak Polish? [49]


Well of course now, you do understand that I made a mistake! I wanted orange but mixed up the two words and asked for tomato which would be a rather odd kind of chocolate biscuit!!

And yes, I asked if śmierć (death) was included in the service charge on an apartment :D

Language / Do English-speakers sound funny when we speak Polish? [49]

Not sure what you want me to translate - you mean the conversation in the shop? The biscuits/cookies are of the brand Delicje, sponge things covered in chocolate with a fruit filling and I confused orange and tomato so I asked her for tomato flavour Delicje to which she naturally replied 'But there aren't any' I said 'Oh but there are! There on the shelf/'. 'There are ARE??' she responded. And that's it basically, not very interesting I'm afraid! I suppose the funny thing to me was the stunned expression on her face when I asked for tomato flavour chocolate biscuits!

As for Wlochy, that's Italy and włosy is hair, śmierć is death and śmieci is rubbish. (Sorry, I thought you were Polish.)

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

Well I think the proposed reforms were a bit draconian, especially taken in conjunction with all the other things that have been going on. But you and I won't see eye to eye on that Gumi so no point in discussing it really.


I should imagine because the Commission wants to see if PIS comes up with them off their own bat. Otherwise it adds fuel to the fire of PIS and other Euro-sceptics claiming that the EU is telling them what to do.

Language / Do English-speakers sound funny when we speak Polish? [49]


By bad things, do you mean swearing or being vulgar? If not, then when I first started learning Polish I kept confusing Włochy and włosy and also śmieci and śmierć - I did actually ask whether death was included in the czynsz on a flat. I also asked for those biccies, Delicje pomidorowe instead of pomarańczowe. You should have seen the face on the girl in the shop.

'Ale nie ma'.

'Ale jest' I insisted. 'tam na półce'.

'JEST??? she responded in justifiable amazement turning to look at the shelf. Then the penny dropped 'ah pomarańćowe'. She didn't even smile, let alone laugh. I did though :D

Classifieds / Translate from Polish to American English/or to Polish [8]

Oh yes, I see what you mean now. I took a quick look on YouTube, it looks quite entertaining. Of course Aussies don't sound English, they have a variety of Australian accents according to region or socio-economic group but in the scene I watched a bit of, the guy has taken a shopping trolley from the supermarket and he tells his friend he's taken a 'trolley' which is British English, American is shopping 'cart', is it not? So that's what I mean by the standard being the same as British English. And Australian English is no more slangy than American or British, it's just that they have some unique expressions which are used only in Oz. That's what I would consider to be Australian English.

Classifieds / Translate from Polish to American English/or to Polish [8]


Hi Maf. No, I mean somebody takes their BA in English literature and then takes a Masters in poetry. In DCU, Dublin we have an MA in Poetry Studies and in the UK there are definitely MAs in creative writing in either prose or poetry. I think it's a fairly new thing though.

Regarding Australia, what was the thing you watched? I'm not sure I follow your point. Apart from their accent, what difference did you see in their use of English to standard British English? If you get a business letter from Australia, they'll use British English, as they do in their legal system etc. just as we do in Ireland. I'm not sure how somebody would translate a Polish document into 'Australian English', how would it differ from British English? They use many British terms in their English, for example handbag rather than the American purse but they don't have a different standard Australian word for handbag....... They do use some Americanisms, but then don't we all these days :)

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

More concessions by PIS on the judicial reforms. The previous ones were declared by Timmermans to be insufficient, an opinion shared in particular by the Benelux countries, Sweden and Denmark. There's a meeting coming up next week at which Poland has to present all their planned changes to the reforms and a decision will then be made regarding whether to proceed further with Article 7. Taken in conjunction with the newly confirmed EU policy of linking rule of law to funding, it looks promising.

Classifieds / Translate from Polish to American English/or to Polish [8]

No such thing as 'a degree in poetry'. A degree in literature with a Masters in Poetry is possible though. Not sure it's the best qualification for a translator though. How did he get certified with no degree in Translation studies? And translators don't translate both ways, only into their native language.

Also there is no such thing as Australian English, unless you're talking about slang you flamin' galah! And I don't think that would translate very effectively into any language,especially not Polish :)) Standard English in Australia is British English.

If you're going to try to drum up work for somebody get the CV right or don't bother. Strangely enough your boyfriend seems to have the same name as the JU translation software app.

News / EU confirms it will take action against Poland over court reforms [554]

An update on this: the European Court will issue a preliminary judgement in the Irish extradition case in July. According to an article in The Economist:

"should it declare Poland's judiciary compromised, the consequences could ultimately extend far beyond the EAW. Agreements that rest on mutual trust between judiciaries, including debt, taxes and family law, could be undermined. Firms could challenge public procurement contracts; investors would frantically call their lawyers. A case could be made for suspending EU subsidies to Poland. "

So no doubt all this has influenced PIS's recent first steps in backing down on the judicial reforms. At the moment though it's still all just talk and more stalling from PIS.

News / Intentional Miscegenation in Poland [26]

Yes, I follow my own lead - as the song says "goin' this way, that way, forwards, backwards, over the Irish Sea, a bottle o' rum to settle me tum and that's the life for me" :))


You weren't paying attention then in Lecture number 137 (b) paragraph (ii) blah blah at the Trolling Academy.

News / Intentional Miscegenation in Poland [26]

Good use of keywords for the old SEO in your thread title Slavi. As we all know there's hardly a black face to be seen in Poland, proportional to the population so such a thread is utterly without foundation in reality. It's obvious that you're hard at work on your list of trolling topics for the propaganda machine. Interesting how the central theme of art runs through your material, a nice way of tying it all together. Another stripe to add to your decorations for the May Day parade :)

Have to stay on your case Comrade. As my countryman Edmund Burke said "when bad men combine, the good must associate: else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle".

News / EU budget revamp set to shift funds to southern states. What can Poland do about this? [12]

I think you're being unfair Maf. "Poland has little economic leverage over Germany" is an innocuous statement of fact. Tacitus is right in everything he says. PIS has brought all this about by pursuing a policy of being deliberately awkward, difficult and contemptuous of numerous established norms and rules of the EU. In doing so they've managed to undermine relations even with those countries who had no ill-will towards them to begin with. They chose to ally themselves with Hungary, taking a leaf out of Orban's book and didn't seem to notice that Orban himself backed down when he was threatened with cohesion funds being cut back in 2016. If they had noticed it, they might have seen where they were heading.

As it is, they mistook the EU's tolerance for weakness and the EU has simply given them enough rope with which to hang themselves. Now PIS, having lain on the floor like a two year old, screaming and hammering their heels "I won't, I won't and you can't make me!" finally accept that they must comply with the ECJ ruling on logging and modify the judicial reforms but they're still going to lose out financially, or rather Poland is.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Interesting article here on the Polish recruits who have recently joined the German police, following a Polish recruitment campaign by Germany:

ft.com/content/9f62345e-43a7-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd

Study / Bank Balance requirement for Bachelors Degree from India in Poland [7]

I'm afraid I wouldn't have a clue beyond the details given in the link that I posted. The only advice I can give is that usually with the Polish authorities it's always best to have more documents than less!

Study / Bank Balance requirement for Bachelors Degree from India in Poland [7]

As I understand it from the link I posted, the tuition is not included in the bank balance, only the living costs and he only needs to show that his living expenses are covered for a period of 15 months, not the entire three years:

"543 PLN for each month of the stay for a period of 15 months"

"or for the entire duration of intended residence in Poland, if the stay is intended for less than 15 (12) months."

The Polish government wants to attract foreign students because of the tuition fees they pay and expecting students to have enough money for three years is a bit unrealistic. I suppose that's why the ticket home cost is factored in, the idea being that if the student runs out of money and parents can't provide more, he/she can go back home.

But just in case you're not aware of living costs in Poland and especially in Warsaw, nobody can survive on 500 zł a month. He would need about three times that amount to rent shared accommodation near the university and have enough to eat. It would provide basic food and shelter and not much more. If he has very low rent, maybe he could manage on 1,000.