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

The inhabitants of Chemnitz are showing the world that Germany is reverting to her old ways as soon as the chips are down.

Work / Salary for entry level Scandinavian / Finnish speakers in Poland [10]

Glassdoor, Indeed etc. are often outdated and once their on line, they've been snapped up within less then fifteen minutes. Unreliable.

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

As I've said for the umpteenth time, Hitler couldn't have gotten to first base in his rantings were the not already a fertile soil ready to accept his lunacy!

When idiots like Dr. Frits Claussen in Denmark started in the early forties with similar craziness on the radio, he was laughed off the air practically and de-

rided royally as "Un-Danish in character and spirit".

News / Poland's "historical path" is that of "fascism" (Jew attack alert) [43]

Ck. our latest pics from Chemnitz and I think, I hope, they'll serve at least as an eye-opener!

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

Thank you for someone finally injecting a bit of common sense into the discussion, Miloslaw! Hope you will finally learn something from all this, Ironside; what we don't want to hear, we dub myths, what we WANT to hear, we call truth.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

Social conventions, agreed! That was in fact my point.

History / Invation of Poland - 69 years ago today [18]

Sort of calls to mind that old joke about the American kid in school who becomes friends with a English exchange student. One day the American boy sees his new pal from the UK and punches him square in the nose! The other kid falls to the ground and almost crying says, "What was that for, Billy?" The American boy, "That's for the American Revolution!" "But that was almost two hundred years ago!", so the English boy, to which our Yankee responds "Yeah, but I only learned about it today!":-)

My point here is that remembering the past, be it the German invasion of Poland, Katyn, The Holocaust etc. is certainly respectable, so long as it emboldens us to change the future rather than embitter us to hold eternal grudges based on past events.

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

Ironside,

Only someone in constant denial would denigrate the truth so relentlessly!
If you understood my message(s), then I obviously wouldn't need to harp on the matter of English now, would I.
:-)

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

To a non-native English speaker, I'm certain it must.

Any well-read Anglophone, conversant in history, would read it and undoubtedly draw the same conclusions as yours truly, although possibly not for the same reasons:-)

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

Not quite sure of your point, Crow.
Maybe somebody could help "re-translate" your last sentence into English, since I can't make heads or tails of it!

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

And I'm sure that you and Ironside et al never even knew the Jews existed in Poland until people such as myself brought them to your attention, is that it?

Ya know, y'all oughta write this stuff down and send it to either a TV or radio station for a comedy sketch! You'd make millions!! LOL

:-)

If you read anything about the history of European anti-Semitism, you'd have gleaned by this time that the latter was not something which suddenly sprung up when Hitler rose to power and a nation up and turned from the loveliest folks on earth into a bunch of vicious, ideololgical Jew haters over night. It was something which seethed over the centuries, kept at bay more or less through the Enlightenment influence along with the winds of democracy blowing throughout the Continent, later submerged by the half-hearted failure of the Weimar Republic, only to be crushed by the realization that true democracy was ever so scary for Germans, still reeling from the chaos of the failed Bavarian Putsch under Kurt Eisner in 1918 and shellshocked, so to speak, by the fearsome prospect of anything of that sort happening again.. While obviously not every German (for that matter every Pole etc. though in a different context admittedly) followed Nazi aims by a long shot, the overwhelming effect was of a nation under siege and unable to do what was right, owing to understandable fear, panic, but also in many cases, just plain indifference. Nothing after all is black or white.

Jews were easy targets, scapegoats practically made to order for unscrupulous types who abused peasant ignorance and fanned the flames of hatred.
NO European country was beyond this, whilst certain countries eventually did try to make life at least superficially bearable for the Jews, such as England's

Cromwell who invited the Jews to return after having been thrown out some three hundred years before. Albeit, Cromwell wasn't being entirely altruistic either or acting

under purely "Christian" duty, he was a darned sight better than many a Central European despot. a proven fact of record.

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

Had the fertile soil for such not already been laid for centuries, Hitler wouldn't have been able to carry out his plans!

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]

Kazimierz Wielki didn't "start" anti-Semitism, any more than Hitler created anti-Jewish hostility; both merely fanned the flames of the smoldering embers which already were in the air at the time. In both cases, hatred of Jews had been successfully submerged for a while, only to rear its ugly head as soon as the right lynch pin was pulled!

Work / Salary for entry level Scandinavian / Finnish speakers in Poland [10]

finswe,

Similar background on my end, although no Finnish knowledge to speak of, I know Swedish, Danish, and have a passing survival Bokmaal, mostly for reading purposes:-)

tarsape@gmail

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

Humor is all relative anyhow, folks!

I certainly was not wrong once upon a time in finding "niedzwiedz" comical any more than my Polish buddy was in feeling the same for "water closet".

It's about how individual auditory canals process particular sounds in their inner ear. There are also purely private associations one has with any particular word, perhaps reminding them of a word in their native language:-)

@dolno, the English word "bear" isn't funny to me.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

As I posted yesterday, dolno, the point is not why any given Polish word sounds amusing to foreigners. Surely the entire issue is relative anyhow as no language holds the monopoly on "strange-sounding" words!

Apropos Smygus Dingus, the latter sounds a lot like the Dutch word "dinges" with a similar pronunciation as the Polish, or the older American slang word for random object

"dingus", e.g. in "The Maltese Falcon", when the Sam Spade character refers to the mysterious falcon as "the dingus".

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

In the US, in England perhaps as well, the last name "Oakely" is still known I'm sure throughout the country.
What better cover for a Pole in the States named Bogdan Dabrowski than "Godfrey Oakely"!
LOL

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

Correct. Many such names are merely calques from the other language.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

Ziemowit, the whole point of this thread is that certain Polish words sound odd aka "funny" to foreigners for no apparent reason!
A Polish acquaintance once confessed that when travelling, encountered the term "water closet" and found himself chuckling audibly for quite some time:-)

What's the bleedin' difference then between me finding "niedzwiedz" amusing and my friend chortling over "water closet"?

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

Heaven help us, TheWizard!!

The way Sweden, among other neighboring countries, has sold out to rampant, uncritical multiculturalism merely for its own sake is enough to make this poster puke.

Trust you were being sarcastic:-)

PS
As far as present-day Germany is concerned, being of German grandparentage myself and raised in both languages, German and English, I can only express my greatest admiration for the way post-War Germany rose up out of the ashes of defeat and become what she later grew into. However, she scarcely did it alone. Without Marshal Plan dollars, all the industrial grit, determination and German diligence wouldn't most likely have been worth squat.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

If truth be told, the first time I heard the word "niedzwiedz", I couldn't stop laughing:-)

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

Bratwurst Boy, I certainly wasn't attacking you for being a German. Utterly ridiculous assertion, merely a sign of latent paranoia on YOUR part, not mine!!

I never attack Tacitus on this Forum, also a German, because his arguments/posted messages are always broad-minded, intelligent, logical, and informative, rarely (if ever) yielding to the excesses of temper.

If I "attacked" you, then it surely wasn't for being German, rather for sometimes being a horse's ass!!
:-)

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

The Israeli Jews also depend considerably on The Federal Republic for their Mercedes, fire trucks, and numerous technological advances.
If I depended daily on meat and potatoes stuff for my subsistence, even if it came from an erstwhile enemy, guess I'd be "relaxed" too!

:-)

My point again is simply that what many of you people pop psychologically blithely deem American-Jewish paranoia, is just what I would call being realistic, that's all.

Jews never chose their role as victims (collaborators in far too many instances for comfort), nor did post-War German generations having nothing to do with Hitler or the Holocaust choose to be born in the shadows of such a twisted past.

That's simply the way things worked out, no more, no less.

Language / Polish words that sound funny? [224]

"If they can't swear, they don't converse."

Sounds to me a lot like Sicilian culture, from what I've heard:-)

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

Quite the contrary, guys!

First off, TheOther, we are all quite aware that resistance occurs, such as the Fall of the Wall in '89, when enough right-thinking people band together to defeat evil and are able to pull it off. It sounds simpleminded, yet it's so.

Moreover, I wasn't "indoctrinated" to believe that a leopard never changes its spots. All I'm saying is that the change doesn't, indeed cannot, occur over night. I'm talking decades, maybe generations.

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

To my certain knowledge, folks, neither the Junge Pioniere nor the Boy Scouts were inculcated with racist ideology!
Once the poison of hatred has entered the blood stream, it takes a man or woman with the strength of G-d Himself and the patience of Job to rise above it and see life clearly as it is, untainted by

Nazi prejudice.

Ya think the Hitler Youth were just about hiking through the woods, pickin' wildberries, and singing songs??! Check out the stuff they were singing, and then come back and tell us whether "Die Fahne hoch.." is just good, clean innocent funLOL

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

You mean like Pope Benedikt?
Not everyone jumped on the NS bandwagon.

Genealogy / Ethnic Poles or Ethnic Germans? My family mystery [37]

Grass though was technically "half-Kaszub", since his father was an ethnic Aryan German, hence his conscription into the Hitler Youth, albeit not voluntarily:-)

Study / Looking for universities with online Polish language studies [8]

I'm familiar with the Pimsleur series, but was not too impressed. As with Berlitz and Rosetta, there is an excess of repetition drill sans sufficient explanation of the basic structures being practiced, in the intermediate programs I looked into as well.

A single example occurs to me from that Rosetta Stone intermediate Polish I mentioned briefly the other day. In the pattern drill practicing how to say in Polish "Please bring me a cup of coffee!", nowhere is ever even hinted at the crucial difference in such an easy sentence between "przyniesc" vs. "nosic", and why the former instead of the latter would be used.

Had I relied solely on that program in order to learn Polish with zero background, I'd have been lost...and again, frustrated.

As I think of it, Poznan and Krakow probably have what you're looking for, abd!

Study / Looking for universities with online Polish language studies [8]

On-line classes, what I've observed so far, are usually a waste of time!

Even Rosetta Stone doesn't measure up. I recently on a lark, tried to imagine that I were the average monolingual Anglophone learning Polish on Rosetta, and found myself so frustrated at the lack of depth, I would have given up and demanded my money back, no kidding either.

There is Bookbox which offers countless FREE hours of listening in almost any language there is, but in terms of a serious program, I'd have to refer anybody to the series I used back in the 1990's "Wsrod Polakow", with textbook and accompanying CD Roms (3 of them).

Best damn stuff I've come across yet, because it really made things clear beyond the initial stages of mere repetition drill a la Berlitz et al. The CDs reinforced structure with listening practice, the speakers were all Polish natives apparently, and when we got to the aspect distinction, the textbook didn't gloss over things aka "It's easy, it's easy!" etc., but admitted that it takes years of practice and requires simply rote memorization after a certain point:-)

Can't recommend "Wsrod Polakow" enough. Ought to add I was studying Polish at the time through the Kosciuszko Foundation in Manhattan.
tarsape@gmail.com