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

My first encounter with learning Polish, was a classroom lecture I accidentally stumbled upon while in the corridor at college. The instructor was saying to the students, mystified, perhaps even slightly daunted, by the seeming maze of consonant clusters, that in fact we Anglophones apply many of these same sounds unconsciously while speaking English, without realizing it, e.g. "Misshyu..", casually pronounced "Miss you...", Dzyeetyet for "Did you eat yet.." etc.

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

Recently greeted by a Polish-American colleague who learned his Polish in the US, whereby "Jak sie masz?" (Yok shiiieww mosh), came out sounding more like

"JACK SEE MADGE", no fooling:-)

Yeah, it was pretty funny, yet I held myself back from even smirking...he signs my checks at workLOL

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

We doubtless sound as "funny" to Poles as do Polish-speakers to Anglophones when they speak foreign languages.....including English:-)

History / Israeli wants to wipe Poland off the map! [198]

Your enthusiasm for English is quite apparent in your often "creative" sentence structure and usage:-)

Classifieds / Recruitment - Search for team leaders to support homeworker with Internet skills [5]

Thanks, jon! Sorry I didn't respond earlier, but I just saw your message now:-)

Classifieds / Recruitment - Search for team leaders to support homeworker with Internet skills [5]

"Homeworkers"

Do you mean here "freelancers"? Am familiar with a German expression "Heimarbeiter", meaning either men or women who worked exclusively from their home and exported their services to which ever client would be willing to pay them. I realize you're not a German speaker, but I was merely curious as to what you meant, as the word "homeworkers" is not familiar to my native English lexicon, and I figured might have been a translation from another language.

Just am asking for a little clarification:-)

News / Korwin Mikke: re-badged American Jews pushing Poland into war [33]

Always easy to blame the weak link in the chain. Historically, the Jews rarely had any serious political clout. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

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

That's why I call WWII the only "valid" aka "just" war within the past hundred-and-fifty or so years! Justifiable by anyone's measure, hence the title of Stephen Ambrose' "The Good Fight"!!

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

Had the US taken the "duck and cover" strategy of certain American Firsters of the time, e.g. Norman Thomas and Charles Lindbergh etc., just imagine the dire straights in which the world would have found herself!

Boy are you a hypocrite!! America should be a policeman to the world.....only when it's convenient, such as Vietnam or the Gulf War ("No blood for oil!") but when the Jews were concerned, much of the planet summarily turned its back.

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

You really missed the boat! He pulled us out of a depression by putting American back to work. Hitler's saber rattling started the war, dude!

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

@Ironside, because Roosevelt took our Founding Fathers seriously and desired to use government for the purpose for which it existed, scarcely makes him a faschist!

That Upstate NY kosher chicken farmer who sued and won, accusing Roosevelt (along with the Supreme Court at the time, Justice Brandeis, I believe) of interfering with interstate commerce was in fact a Republican, and so hated Roosevelt from the start.

We needed FDR. How many more depressions, Hoovervilles etc. do you sincerely believe this country could tolerate before being forced down the road of true dictatorship?? Ever heard of Huey Long?

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

Mussolini was far less virulent than Hitler and the circumstances of his rise to power were not identical either.

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

What "fascist ideas", pray?? You don't like someone you automatically call them a faschist because he saved the US for the deserving many instead of those from his own privileged class??! The man had wisdom, vision, and compassion, qualities it appears laughable by today's ignoramuses who have little understanding of life, much less death!

Let's hope Ms.Merkel has the foresight to see the wrongness of what she's doing and be guided by more moderate supporters. About Morawiecki? Still haven't made up my mind about that guy:-)

Work / Diary of a Teacher in Poland [181]

@Polishinvestor,

Guess then by your logic, and I encounter it habitually nearly every day, those opposing the Nazis should justa kept their mouths shut and silently, dutifully gone along with the madness, after all, the "New Order" was the way of the world, so why fight it, huh?

Sorry, mack!! Thinking and feeling humans know there's gotta be a better way, since some of 'em experienced the better way, when greed was reigned in, when the tone in the air was not markets, markets, markets, but instead, a standard for all, teachers, doctors, etc.

No sense rationalizing! Folks went to war over a better way than merely the status quo. Once, the status quo was so much higher than it is today, it's nearly unrecognizable.

When I was in grade school, up through high school, teachers were basically knowledge workers who were expected to know something, to correct faulty grammar at the risk of today's so-called "political correctness", know their stuff backwards, forwards, and inside out. We pupils expected such and parents wouldn't have had it any other way.

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

Yet another useless stereotype, even if meant in jest!

Work / Diary of a Teacher in Poland [181]

@Dirkdiggler,

Greed is NOT good! The Bible calls it one of the seven deadly sins for a good reason. Greed is what turned medicine and law into businesses instead of letting them remain practices where the focus was and should always be people over profit.

Teaching is still a noble calling, until it becomes denegrated by no-nothing Trumpazoids masquerading as guardians of capitalistic freedomLOL

Someone ought to remind our Fearless Leader that with economic freedom comes responsibility, such responsibility as can only come from strict limits.

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

@Maf, face facts! Before Roosevelt there was zero safety net for sudden job loss or illness. FDR saved America!!! Trump, aided by the wake of Reaganism, wants to destroy what it took years to build up.

Work / Diary of a Teacher in Poland [181]

The "teacher status" issue clearly overrides that of a perhaps far better paying, yet less culturally illustrious, profession. It's all a question of societal perception. A published art historian, for example, earns a pittance, and probably always will, compared with a hedge-fund manager, top broker, or certainly any contemporary rap star or major athlete whose salaries in the latter case often far exceed their talent. I call it representative vs. actual value:-)

Today's garbage men are highly unionized and can earn quite nicely. All this for merely handling trash all day, and what with no more required than at most a ninth grade education. Far more cultivated, educated and skilled workers in professions such as academia often earn far less for doing far more work which is scarcely replaceable in contrast with a man or woman whose repetitive task could really be done by anybody.

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

Johnny, before FDR's New Deal the WAS NO MIDDLE CLASS; you were either rich through inherited wealth or a robber baron, or you didn't have a pot to **** in, literally!

No one wants a return to those times. Look what happened in Germany pre-'33.

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

Only radical neo-Marxists didn't send non-believers in the cause to gas chambers.

Know a gent from former GDR-Germany who's now about eighty-five and grew up under the last years of the Third Reich. Later, when the family moved East to Berlin under the Russian occupation, this guy experienced another type of dictatorship, admittedly NOT a "democratic" society by anybody's yardstick.

He now lives in Centennial, Colorado in a nice mega compound-type house for the wealthy and you couldn't find a more rabid, die hard, perfervid Trump supporter of untrammeled, laissez faire capitalism if you tried!!! Mention the very phrase "government subsidies for the struggling middle class" and the dude starts foaming at the mouth:-)

Language / Text message - what does " K. C. " and "8" mean? [15]

What's wrong with "Trzymaj sie!" if the person you're texting is Polish? "Keep cool!" might have different connotations in English from just "Take it easy!"

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

From your (idealistic) young lips to God's ear.

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

Immigration surely has gone haywire, this is for certain. Sadly, I never in my life would have thought that I might even be a limited advocate of the quota system.

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

But that's where the similarity ends:-)

When a woman comes to power in Europe, typically she's a Dr. Gro Brundtland Harlem, a Vika Fridbergis, an Angela Merkel. In America.... Sarah Palin??!!

Don't make me barf!

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

She's presently conferring with our Tweeter-in-Chief in D.C. Maybe this time, Trump'll have better luck!
LOL

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

I would avoid negative stereotyping, kondzior. After all, most presumed "national charactaristics" usually have a basis in history. What we today know as "Germany" was for centuries the so-called "land in the middle", without perceptible borders, firm national identity, bound together solely by her language. It was essentially a collection of petty kingdoms, duchies, dukedoms and not unified until 1871, relatively late for Europe. Even America won her independence nearly a century or so earlier in 1776.

Germany too was late to industrialize, eventually doing so with such a vengeance that the British were finally to insist that the sentence "MADE IN GERMANY" be inscribed on all goods coming from that country.

This "anal", bureaucratic quality to which you casually refer was therefore the result of a continued feeling of economic inferiority compared with Germany's neighbors, such as France. Even Italy, though also late to unify, had her glory of the Roman Empire upon which she could rest her laurels; Germany had no such heritage on which to fall back, and it galled her no end.

All this made the question of Germany identity such a sore point for so many decades, culminating of course in the figure of Adolf Hitler.

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

Germany's oldest city, Trier (forget its original Latin appellation though), was of course once a Roman settlement and strong traces of these early settlers are still ever present throughout the Rhine-Cologne area, both in the appearance of the population as well as ancient ruins attesting the presence of the Romans within the German realm!

How intriguing indeed that it was those Germanic tribes, among them the Vandals, which of course invaded the Roman Empire, laying waste everything and everyone in their path.

Language / Diminutive help? Wiktoria, Mikołaj, Elzbieta [9]

"Kubus", yes of course. My error. Cf. "Bogdan" < "Bogus" etc...
:-)

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

Many have remarked over the years on what younger Germans interviewed during the late '60's, up through the mid-'70's (during the height of the Auschwitz-Trials in Frankfurt), concluded, that there must be some "flaw" in the German national character which allowed things to reach the boiling point and lead to, what Goldhagen called, an "eliminationist mentality", facilitating the Shoah to proceed relatively smoothly, with few if any moral scruples to interfere with the extermination process.

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

According to Claude Lanzmann's exhaustive documentary "Shoah", although factually correct what you stated concerning the relatively small percentage of direct German participation, a relatively HIGH percentage actually knew of, or knew even enough about to in fact suspect what was happening, the sometimes unbearable stench of the burning corpses in neighboring towns and so forth! They simply refused to accept the truth, hence the enforced "visits" following the end of the war of townspeople to the crematoria sites, so as they were made to smell as well as see the unspeakable atrocities for themselves.