News / Is Poland the only high minded country of Cental and Eastern European countries? [41]

To what extent is Poland any more "high" or low-minded than any other Central and Eastern European country?
I remain unconvinced.

Language / English borrowings in Polish [38]

@Milo,

You're advocating laziness rather than care in manner of expression! Pawian is not only within his rights to complain, but he just happens to be correct, bull's eye!!

Furthermore, who died and made you boss as to which words fit and which do not?

English has the word "garden", a perfectly acceptable word. Maybe you prefer "jardin", if only because it sounds French aka "foreign".

Fine and dandy, yet it still begs the nagging question, WHAT THE F***K'S WRONG WITH "GARDEN"??

Language / English borrowings in Polish [38]

Hear, hear Pawian!!

Purists of the world, unite! All you have to lose is your sanity.

Language / Sticklers for grammar? [17]

Merely a word play, pal!
:-)

Language / Sticklers for grammar? [17]

Might have known, GOWniarzLOL

Language / Sticklers for grammar? [17]

As I recall, it appeared "glowny" as in German "HAUPTbahnhof" or "head" aka main station:-)

Language / Sticklers for grammar? [17]

The Dworzec Glowny in Szczecin was relatively close to our hotel. My friend though at the time, was a student of architecture in Berlin and was nagging me to take her to see the local City Hall, as she only knew German and I could translate for her a little.

Language / Sticklers for grammar? [17]

I wouldn't consider "Gdzie jest ratusz?" in any way improper, would you?

Language / 'MOZNA' - When is this used? [27]

Mozna functions like trzeba in it's impersonal usage, doesn't it? I'm thinking of the stock phrase "Zreszta nie trzeba!" aka "Keep the change!" when informing

a server that the diner is leaving the remaining charge from the bill to them, for instance. Literally, the Polish says "Rest not necessary".

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

Certainly, Poles would strenuously object to being "Teutonicized":-)

"Zwis meski"??? I love it!!:-)

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

However, what's right for you, is not necessarily so for many others, Rich!
Therefore, how does your way make you somehow "superior" to other language groups which communicate in a completely different manner? Does interpreting life differently from you make it "wrong"??!

There's no answer to this, because there's nothing to discuss, it's a moot point:-)

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

@kaprys,

You seem to have missed my point some re: Polish as a "word poor" language in comparison with English.
My point was simply that, as Polish never experienced an event equivalent to the Norman Conquest of England in the year 1066, the language remained more or less 90% SLAVIC, with some couple of hundred foreign loans from French, German, English, Russian etc.

In the case of English, the Norman Invasion by solely French-speaking conquerors created a sort of dual-level language, one level Germanic aka "Anglo-Saxon", the tongue of the largely illiterate farming and petty tradesmen population of England, the second level being taken from Latinate (French) and Greek, the language of borrowings spoken by the literate clergy along with the nobility.

The examples you gave "dom"/"domostwo", "spiacy"/"uspiony" and so forth scarcely illustrate my point of a language with dual roots, merely, that Polish, like any language, is also rich in synonyms, that's all.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

@kaprys,

I could already see by your posts that you're intelligent enough not to even lend the slightest credence to the ludicrous assertion by
certain of our members that a language by virtue of personal prejudice is either inferior or superior to another:-) Furthermore, there
has never been a scintilla of proof that a given tongue, either extant or extinct, is imperically "better" or "worse" than any other. This
simply reflects the inherent laziness of the monolingual Anglophone as regards the impetus needed to communicate effectively in
a second language....as does more than half the globe!

You know the old one liner, I'm sure. "What do you call someone who speaks more than one language?" - Answer: bilingual
"What do you call someone who speaks only their own language? - Answer: an American LOL

Apropos English being "simple" compared to other language which you've studied, I would argue that while modern as opposed to Old English is
surely a relatively straightforward language both in terms of its morphology as well as its everyday syntax of almost predictable S + V + O pattern,
English orthography is darned near as chaotically UNpredictable and erratic as any spelling known to man:-) Our vocabulary too is ever so
vast because, in comparison with, say, Polish, English ever since 1066 AD and the Norman Conquest has acquired a heavy Latin overlay
to its already Germanic root structure and word stock. For nearly every "English" word, there's a Latin or Greek-derived "twin" at the ready,
depending upon register, of course. For example, "sleeping" vs. "dormant", "house" vs. "domicile", "anger" vs."fury ad infinitum.

The Polish native speaker is faced with no such confusion. While surely foreign loans in the hundreds at least have long since entered the language,

the base word stock was and remains primarily Slavic.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

On the other hand, scholars are still able to decipher Ottoman texts in their entirety, I've read.
Perhaps though Turkey wasn't the most fitting example here:-)

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

Hey out there,

I think we're confusing speaker percentage world wide with alleged language "superiority".
Once Latin was the international tongue in which scholars from far flung European countries corresponded with one another in writing (when people knew how to write LOL).

Later on, French overtook that role and it was indeed a mighty tough act to follow. Eventually, that inheritance fell for quite a long while to German, later to be replaced more or less, less than more, by English, at least in global variety following British Standard:-)

Compared with many other languages, English has long since shed her "prehensile" tail of case endings and a degree of morphological richness and synchresis, charactaristics typical of most synthetic languages such as German, Polish, and Finnish as compared with analytic languages, namely English.

The beauty of certain of the world's spoken treasures, is that they allow the contemporary citizen to read and understand much, though not all, of that country's past without too much trouble.

A modern-day Anglophone of average schooling wouldn't know what they're looking at if confronted with Beowulf, even Canterbury Tales in the original and without annotation.

Not so in Iceland, Turkey or any number of other societies which see their history correctly, not as a rupture or breach with the present, but instead as merely a continuum into the future.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

"I am not being sarky,..."

You're right, you're being unthinkingly ethnocentric, not to mention just plain wrongheaded!
Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Hardy ain't the only dance in town, mate:-) The Poles have Mickiewicz,
the Germans have Goethe, Schiller..., the French have Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Proust and so forth.

No language is superior to any other, this has been linguistically proven by people far more enlightened than
either of us.

Surprised at your ignorance, Milo, I'm being serious. Some of your posts really had me fooled.
Oh well, go figure people.

By the way gang, Polish (unlike Russian, for example) is called in linguistics a "pronoun drop" language, meaning the pronoun can be omitted, except for emphasis.

This can be confusing at times.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

Yeah, looks like.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

Name me any nation, the US above all, which doesn't believe that THEIRS and theirs alone is a gift bestowed upon them
by the Allmighty, above and beyond all others!!

So long as you dislike Polish people as much as you claim you do, I'd imagine you'd have a similar complaint about
the US, Germany, France, Italy etc.

Now tell me I'm wrong.

@Milo, unless you're being sarky, NO language is linguistically, culturally or morally superior to another.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

Still don't get your beef with Polish, but, sure I will one of these decades.

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

I happen to concur with the first part of your statement at any rate:-)

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

To paraphrase somewhat ol' Winnie, "snobs indeed, with much to be snobs about!"

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

I never patronize, I only respond in kind.
Had I received some polite, if tacit, consent from NoTo Foreigners regarding my Polish, I would have replied in a friendly, considerate manner.

Put on the boxing gloves, you'll get clobbered!!!
:-)

It's also just entirely possible that those Frenchmen, more to the point, didn't understand my English, now isn't it?

The present commentary has clearly spiraled out of control.

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

There ya go!

Life / Is it true that you cannot swear in public in Poland? [13]

Wildrover made a good point, although now such an old post:-)
Would any fine extend to swearing in a language other than Polish?
lol

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

"Mowic" vs. "powiedzic" was explained to me more or less as follows through these two examples:

(On the telephone - person to another outside the conversation) "Chwileczke, Marysia MOWILA, ze ona jest chora a pozostaje dzis wieczor w domu." vs. "Nauczycielka POWIEDZIALA mi, ze zdalem egzamin!"

In the first example, the sentence might be adequately translated as "Just a moment, Marysia [just] SAID that she's sick and will
stay home this evening."

However, the second sentence, "The teacher TOLD me that I passed [the exam]."

The above distinction is so subtle to a native Anglophone such as myself, that frankly, I didn't get the difference at all when I first started to learn Polish:-) In English, only a pluperfect pain in the rear end hair splitter of a pedant would say that one sentence is more "correct" than the other.

In Polish apparently, the distinction is the difference between grammatically proper as opposed to improper usage.

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

And your English is Google Translate at worstLOL

You shouldn't judge what you don't completely understand.
I've run into your type too many times to recount, oddly enough though, those in question exclusively were Frenchmen, Parisians, to be exact:-) They claimed that only the true Frenchman from France, that is, from her capital, can or could ever express themselves in that language. Therefore, foreigners such as I should merely do the French that kindest of favors, and speak English when in Paris.

Naturally, the punch line of the joke here is that their English was without exception so awful, all I could do was to stop from laughing in their faces! Often, I honestly didn't understand what they were saying, and so I had no choice but to speak to them in my albeit fractured French. My pronunciation saved the day, more than I could say about theirs!

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

@kaprys, I can only second your post!

As I just got finished saying the other day, learning a language can be done "organically" aka " as a child learns without second-language intereference as much as humanly possible, but learning a language has in the end NO shortcuts to competence and is NOT magic:-)

Language / So why did you give up learning Polish? [105]

All kidding aside, learning any foreign language, in this case Polish, is one of the most satisfying, not to mention sheer practical, decisions you can make:-)

More power to you!

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

Actually, I've never seen the word in print, thanks Maf:-)

@Joker & Lenka As far as any critical impressions of either Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur, I never used Babbel, this is true and so no, I can't judge its effectiveness.

I will say, that my Polish would doubtless be nowhere near the Upper Intermediate to Advanced level it is now, had I relied exclusively on Rosetta, that's for sure! As I'd mentioned in a previous post, I tried to imagine I was learning Polish as a rank newbie by diving into an early chapter which takes place in a café/"coffee bar", and would have been confused no end by the way in which the material was presented, making no apparent reference to the difference between the two forms in Polish of the English verb "to bring".

However, I certainly never intended to discourage you in my post. I think it's great and I reiterate "Dobrej zabawy!".

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

At the moment, only the former, unfortunately. Of course, there's always Skype:-)

My biggest beef with ANY such language learning series is that it's going to be focused on sales, not scholarship!
Hey, these guys wanna sell some CDs here and make some mullah. Can't really blame 'em for that, can ya?

However, if serious, monastically focused foreign language acquisition is one's primary goal, and a laudable one it
is, all of the above are in essence a waste of time and money, sorry to be so blunt about it. You're not going to master

counting quirks, case usage or aspect distinctions aka sound like a literate vs. a semi-literate Polish speaker from Pimsleur,
Rosetta, even Babbel, and so resign yourself to that fact!

A solid working tourist knowledge of the language is basically all you can honestly expect. If you're satisfied with that,
then mazel tov, dude. Go for it and Powodzenia!!