UK, Ireland / No Poles Allowed! - Latest Polonophobic Outrage Out of Britain [660]


he externalizes his self-loathing onto his psychological Other....

it's frustrating because it's impossible to have a reasoned discussion with his hysterical screeching in everybody's face, like trying to have an adult conversation with an infant in the middle of a tantrum in the room

UK, Ireland / No Poles Allowed! - Latest Polonophobic Outrage Out of Britain [660]


If I start here... that's only 120 words, the assignment was 300. Try again and remember to indent!

My feeling is that a government should look out after the interests of

1) citizens inside the country
2) citizens outside the country
3) legal non-citizen residents
4) others

in that order. Trying to perform grand humanitarian gestures or conduct large scale immigration policies when a signfiicant percentage of 1) is not doing well is government taking its eye off the ball. It sounds like the UK government took it's eye off the ball a long time ago.

UK, Ireland / No Poles Allowed! - Latest Polonophobic Outrage Out of Britain [660]


compare the contempt you heap upon native British white failures with your tender approach to Somalis...


Compare and contrast in a 300 word essay, due next Monday. Yes, spelling counts.


Over 20 years isn't enough for them to learn English in an English speaking country? You're really talking about people who are either actively stupid or actively don't care about being a burden (which is worse?)

I agree that Dirk's ill-informed buzzword heavy rantings are tiresome. But issues of collective success and failure should inform immigration policy. You can't do anything once they're citizens, but you can decide that (for example) taking in a bunch of Somalis the next time they wreck their own country is not good policy.

UK, Ireland / No Poles Allowed! - Latest Polonophobic Outrage Out of Britain [660]


You're not supposed to notice that, and if, against advice, you notice, you're officially not supposed to care. The UK government sees people as interchangeable widgets and perceives no difference between a predominantly Polish and predominantly Somali neighborhood in terms of education, crime or unemployment.


Most of the ones you see are not most of them, who are unemployed and on benefits (by all statistics available, if you know of statistics that show they aren't an overall drag on the budget then please let me know.

UK, Ireland / No Poles Allowed! - Latest Polonophobic Outrage Out of Britain [660]


Which makes their over 50% unemployment rate all the more inexcusable. Somalis don't do very well in any country (including their own) and even the success stories (like the US) are only relative to other countries with Somalis...

Why do they fail everywhere? Culture? Religion? Genetics? Some horrible combination of all three?

"I'm so glad all these Somalis moved here" said no one, ever.

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]

But they've been raised by people who did. The communist period was a major collective trauma for Polish people and it takes decades for a population to work through that. Spain is still symbolically fighting their civil war (another major collective trauma).

Here's the kicker, it takes decades to work through collective trauma and Poland hasn't even begun to deal with the trauma of communism yet.... the relentless politicization of the period (by different sides trying to make themselves look good) has just put it off further.

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]


Some years ago a colleague from the UK needed a small surgical procedure and after consideration decided to go through with it in the UK. It went well enough but her Polish doctor was horrified at the lack of follow up care (which led to complications).

That there are serious systemic problems in the Polish healthcare system is beyond debate. What's surprising is that it works at all given the low priority it has in the government (and the tendency for the public to not want to pay for more while wanting vast amounts more care) etc etc etc.

Just copying another country's system is no answer either, it will have to develop and evolve on its own (with more money from the government which means increased healthcare withdrawals from people's pay).

(nb I'm reposting this because it's completely on topic and was mistakenly put in random by one of the mods, the final sentence is especially on topic)

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]


Actually not that much, healthcare as a part of the total budget is very small in Poland compared to some countries. The answer is that healthcare taxes need to be sharply increased. Will you be cooooool with that?

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]


How long would it have taken the British to stare down the USSR and topple communism nonviolently?

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]


that's the key, right there. every system in the world is undergoing constant fiddling either in the public eye or behind the scenes.

I was talking with someone in the business and asked about the coverage issue.

to simplify things a bit, part of the idea was to make sure that people were paying into the system, so they think of themselves as stakeholders rather than just having the old commie period "gimme gimme gimme" attitude. it might not have worked completely but the old attitude was simply unsustainable.

he says almost everyone now is covered in some way and your husband's case sounds like a bit of a fluke (overestimating the time he'd be covered while between jobs and not getting the interim necessary paperwork done and really bad timing).

I'm sure I don't have to explain why coverage is not extended indefinitely once a person stops paying in...

Language / How do Poles feel about foreigners learning their language? [105]


I'll let the Polish posters tell me who's right, me or you....

Ziemowitku! Chodź to na chwilę!

Language / How do Poles feel about foreigners learning their language? [105]


To nie trzeba tego robić - is something no native speaker (even if they spent 50 years outside the country not speaking Polish) would think is an acceptable Polish sentence. The obvious equivalent would be Nie musisz tego robić.

Niech mamusia to zostawi. - Does not sound like anything a Polish speaker would say to their mother*.... just weird, weird, weird. But since the poster has no mother I guess it's understandable that he would get confused.

A better translation of the english sentence might be 'mamo, zostaw to'


As a non-Pole who knows nothing of the country, many Polish ways confuse (and apparently enrage) you

Take a chill pill and stop pretending to be someone you're not.

Life / What are your experiences of care for your loved ones in hospitals here? [75]


I know people in the healthcare field (some of whom have been involved in various reforms).

One problem is that after 45 years of communism and the shock therapy of the early 1990s hospitals were left drowning in debt (where many remain). The original reform around 1999 or so (kasa chorych) was based on the German Krankenkasse system with a big dose of regional autonomy.

The idea was that nobody knew what would work given the financial realities of the time which tended toward the very grim and so regional kasy could experiment some and when a solution that worked well was found it could be adopted by others and if something didn't work others knew not to try it. It was slowly improving but widespread dissatisfaction led to restructuring into a centralized system an election platform and thus the NFZ was born.

There's a lot more, but one of the basic problems is that the public always wants more healthcare than any system can provide (esp in a country full of hypochondriacs) and so healthcare funding mechanisms are always being fiddled with.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

If you watch a bunch of tv shows and/or movies with fan made subtitles you can get a feel for things that the translators mis-hear.

Just today I saw how "regional" was translated as "oryginalne" and Sudafed was misheard as "sue the fed"

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


How long have you lived in an English language environment? I'm talking about otherwise fluent people who live in Poland.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

ime Poles can distinguish pet and pat (na przykład) when they are presented as a pair or in very slow speech. In native speed their ability to hear difference tends to weaken or disappear, similarly it's difficult for Polish native speakers to hear differences in stress (like Reagan vs ray gun)

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


This might be a good test for bilingualish people, if they sound the same the person is dominant in English and if they sound different they're dominant language is Polish...

Another test about language dominance among Polish bilinguals is whether they can watch a movie in their other language with a Polish lektor, they're dominant in Polish or equally bilingual it doesn't bother them if they're dominant in the non-Polish language they can't stand it.

Life / Meeting new people in Warsaw [10]


I knew people that went from zero to taking medical advice over the phone in 6 months, it's only as hard as you want it to be...

Life / Meeting new people in Warsaw [10]


That's not who you want to be targeting, Poland in English is not nearly as interesting as Poland in Polish.

I second the dancing classes. Look for people who practice other hobbies you might be interested in. Chances are there are people who are also interested in it in Poland and getting to know them will help your integration and language skills.

Where do you live? Lots of neighborhoods have bulletin boards for community center events.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


Yeah, it's what used to be called the 'phonemic grid' in linguistics, one's primary language (which is not always the first acquired) largely determines how a person perceives sounds and there do seem to be limits on how much distinctions not found in the primary language will be perceptible when they hear or learn other languages.

With English and Polish this means that English speakers will never hear the distinction between sz and ś (or cz and ć etc) that clearly.

Polish speakers will never hear distinctions between 'pet' and 'pat' (especially in the middle of a sentence) that clearly (and they're liable to not hear final p, t or k as pronounced by many Americans at all).

There are also limits on things like how well speakers of non-tonal languages will ever be able to hear tonal distinctions in Chinese or Thai (for example). Polish learners are also generally terrible at long and short vowel distinctions in languages like Japanese where they are crucial

These are normal phenomena that for some reason become the focus of weird political debate here...

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


They sound the same (or as close as makes no difference) to English speakers,
Polish speakers tend to hear the English ch as being closer to cz than to ć and so they don't sound quite the same, the English word sounds more like bycz to most with Polish as a first and primary language.

This is similar to the words written 'no' in both languages.
English speakers tend to think they sound the same, Polish speakers tend to hear the difference between 'no' (Polish) and 'noł' (how they hear the English word).

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

/bɪt͡ʃ/ =/= /bɨt͡ɕ/

the different phonetic symbols mean they are pronounced..... differently, it's not my fault if you don't understand IPA

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

read it and weep

en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/*****
Pronunciation
/bɪt͡ʃ/

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


He can't even argue like a Pole, he argues like a dumb American teenager losing his temper and resorting to personal abuse.... Polish people in Poland (where dumb pointless arguments are the national sport) don't do that (except mabye for elementy who hang out in front of stores drinking by 8.00 in the morning)

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

felczer!

The first time I came across that word I burst out laughing for 10 minutes.... (in American English 'feltch' refers to a disgusting sexual act that I'm fairly sure, at least I hope, that no one has ever actually done).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldsher

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


Like me! If I listen with my linguist ears I can sometimes hear a difference but with my everyday ears they sound the same, but its possible to understand Polish perfectly well without hearing that particular difference (or ż-ź cz-ć, dż-dź) there aren't that many times where not hearing the difference leads to confusion...

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


To english speakers (esp if they don't know Polish) they sound very much alike or identical. Polish speakers would probably hear the English word more as bycz


As you would know if you lived in Poland, the normal spelling is 'chipsy' but if one were to write in Polish orthography it would be czipsy (analagous with the old sometimes spellings dżin (gin) and dżinsy (jeans)

sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/chipsy-i-czipsy;3760.html


A Pol-Am who lives in the US and sometimes visits Poland and likes to daydream about living there. Nothing to be defensive about (I sometimes daydream about living somewhere else too)

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


whatevs.... I'm perfectly okay with my identity (American living in Poland) why aren't you happy with yours?

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]


yeah, not native but I do (since I live here) and I often translate academic Polish into English


defensive?

Polish speakers (in Poland) tell me that the English ch sounds somewhere between ć and cz, while you say it sounds like ć.... who should I believe?

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

not as pronounced by Americans (thank you R!)


you =/= 99.9 % of Polish speakers... you probably have a Polish American accent that maybe merges cz and ć

I'm not sure if that's a feature but I remember years ago a native speaker of American Polish didn't think there was a difference between ś and sz ("It's just 'sh'"