Life / Do expats living in Poland speak Polish? [233]


I forgot to answer this part.

I think it's amazing that people can converse without opening their mouths. :)
I have a theory about why the language developed in such a closed mouthed way and it is this...

Being a very cold climate in winter, opening the mouth wider to speak would involve more heat loss to the body. So a fairly closed mouthed language evolved.

...it's probably a heap of crap, but I'd love to hear other people's ideas.

What else do I think about it? I think agreement and declension suck, but I've tried to learn Polish like a child learns language, by absorption of whole phrases rather than consciously thinking about cases and genders. (Conversely, it takes a very gifted Pole to be able to get definite and indefinite articles in the right places in English. You can spot the non-natives on this forum very easily on that alone - but fair play to them for posting - I wouldn't be able to post decent quality written Polish).

The adult way of learning a language might be faster (vocab and grammar) but that's not how we teach our kids to speak natively is it? At least, not until they reach school age.

My son (almost 7) has been brought up "one parent, one language" from birth. He often corrects my Polish, but I can still get him sometimes. For example, the other day I told him "Kuba is short for Jakub". He disagreed with me. "No it's not". I said "Let's ask Mummy" ;)

Dad was right. I still know more than him about tennis, photography, building etc. But how long will it last?

Life / Do expats living in Poland speak Polish? [233]

I'd say "quite well". Not perfect, but I can pass for a Polak unless I need to use a complicated sentence with lots of declension and agreement in it. ;)

I started by learning the pronounciation, learned some basic grammar from a book and the rest has been picked up the hard way. For example I learned a lot of building terms (and swear-words) when we built our "piętro" extension on the house. I learnt a lot of tennis terms when I got out there and played tennis with the locals.

Knowing the language is essential to understanding the people. I don't just mean understanding what they say, but understanding why they are the way they are. I found that once I can speak directly to people and have a conversation in their own language, I started to understand some of the differences in ways of thinking. (And boy are there some large differences:) )

I agree with the poster above. Anybody who makes no effort to learn the language is missing out.

Life / Mosquitoes in Poland [40]

No. From what I hear there are less than usual this year.