Work / Any TEFL teachers in Poland out there? [28]

Dave's ESL Cafe is very good for all around the world and even has separate areas for China and South Korea. I would have thought Warsaw would be better for looking for jobs as it would have more language schools though I do know that Poland is a popular destination for new teachers of English-it might be that standards are lower as South Korea and Turkey only accept university graduates but CELTA qualified teachers are welcome in Eastern Europe.


I have a Trinity Certificate that I have never used-have mine for free! I honestly do not think that they are worth the money. Can I ask you, how much is it to do the course now?

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


I did not slag off the Poles. My son had a Polish passport, though it is out of date now. What do you want one for anyway? If you live overseas, it is very expensive. I think we paid £46 and that is thirteen years ago. If you want to buy property or land it may help too. I am not sure if foreigners can buy land now-they could not until very recently. The last time I was in Czestochowa you had to have Polish citizenship, a passport or a pobyt na stale for a minimum of two years in order to apply to buy.

News / What is wrong with Poland that Poles emigrate? [167]


Part of the reason is that the rest of Europe does not allow them in to work legally.


It is still a hell of a lot of people in a small country

I went to Leatherhead late this morning and I saw there is a Polish cafe just opened up called Blue Cafe. There were three Polish people inside running it, a man even bigger than I am. I am 184 centimeters but he dwarfed me! Two Polish ladies were helping him and one, a youngish girl, who brought me my coffee was quite nice looking too! I do not know if they were impressed with my Polish or not, I suppose they are just there earning a living at the end of the day but they agreed that a lot had changed since 1985. I drove on towards Guildford and dropped in at a charity shop in Bookham and two Polish girls with what looked like their mother were trying on clothes. I drove on to yet another second charity shop at Burpham on my way home, just outside Guildford and there were yet another three Polish women buying clothes so it does look as if it is difficult to ignore them in England now.

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]

I thought that my U.K. origins were quite clearly stated

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


No, the Pewex is hitory now of course but I remember how we used to use them. I do not know if it was a good idea or not. I think today, I would shun those sort of places as I am against it through principle but these Pewex or whatever they were existed throughout Eastern Europe. They were known as Bieriozka in Russia and we had them in the ukraine too, known as 'Kasztan'. I remember when I was in Kharkow I even used on to buy some dreadful Russian wine and took it back to England. My father never said a word and I never bought any more!

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


so again, it all goes down to the fact that women are very devious when they want to be.

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


That has to be decided


No, you are saying that you parents and grandparents were Polish. I have not discussed your nationality at all.

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


She ended up loosing her job and as far as I know, they are back together again now.


You might be right but then again, I only know and can answer what people are saying on a forum, knowing people in real life is totally different and much more complicated.


No-that is impossible. Polish people love to talk and talk and talk. They will say anything and everything to anybody about everybody else, it is in their natures.


I was not slagging anybody off, I just warned of the dangers and bad sides to holding another overseas passport.

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]

Yes, and that is what they do. People come over from the former Soviet union and buy a Polish passport. Then, they can move on, for example, into England and find work religitimatlly. There was a very interesting television programme not so long ago where a lady traveled through the former Eastern Europe and bought for herself loads and loads of passports, all of course, on the black market.


Maybe they could not speak to each other in the same language! Maybe one was a Pole showing somebody else where the consulate was? But yes, I know what you mean. I was once in Tesco doing my shopping and met someone with whom I was working and he was with his wife. He talked-she said nothing and simply walked on! I wondered 'what on earth did they have in common?' Later on she left him and rented out a house on her own. He had to pay the rent for her house because she threatened to make him sell their house and split the money if he did not agree to her demands. I could see that there was nothing between them but he had not seen it for himself but who am I to tell somebody what I can see?

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


Rubbish-you do not know what you are talking about. My boy still has both passports though the Polish one is now out of date and unused.

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]

What has that got to do with anything?

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


Why? I have explained to you why it is such a bad idea. It has nothing to do with Communism. My eldest son got a Polish passport when he was about six months old and had never even been to Poland. Anybody of Polish origin can have one but what for?

Genealogy / How hard is it to get a Polish passport? [74]


Yes you can have two passports if you want to. It is not a good idea to have two passports if you are British in Poland as if you have Polish nationality and you are in trouble with the police or they want to to undertake national service you will have to do it and the British Consulate will do nothing to help you. If you are an American, I do not know though I suppose that it is a nice way to get around all the bureaucracy and be able to work your way around Europe without having to apply for work permits and visas, after all, Poland is in the EU and it gives privileges now.

Language / Przypadki (Polish language cases) [59]

Polish grammar does seem difficult at first and a good book should help. It all seems a little stupid why you need to change things at all anyway as an example ja jest w Londyn i pracuie w biuro. Ja mam duzo kolegi i teraz siedzi tu w pokoj i czyta ksiazka. All the information is there and there is no need to know grammar to convey meaning. The funny thing about the Poles is that they do not want to say przepraszam but only the English word sorry and I even heard over the weekend on M jak Milosc-'to nie bylo fair' just as in English, not 'to nie jest fairowe! so it all depends on the Poles. When they do not want to know about grammatical declensions anything goes for them too.

Language / Przypadki (Polish language cases) [59]

The thing would be to show the person a table of grammatical execises, many books will show you how this is done, even some dictionaries will give examples.

Language / Polish Lessons Units [189]


I think that is probably the case with most languages. I know someone who used to study German. He told me that German starts easy and becomes difficult whereas English for Germans starts difficult but then becomes easy. There must certainly always be a 'threshold' over which each and every one of us has to climb.

Incidentlaly, I really like the tapes of Polish sounds.

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

Yes, but byki.com is very very limited, better than nothing for a few of the very basics but you will not learn to speak a language from that material.

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

You are lucky if you have a college, which offers lessons. In London it may be easy but otherwise around the U.K. I would think that there are very few courses which would attract enough students to keep them going for long. At Guildford College, I was told by the receptionist, who was Polish herself until she left for another job, that the college is to start lessons in the next acamemic year. Motivation is the one thing above all other things, which will spell final success or failure. I had lessons in Guildford each evening with my Polish wife in the local pub, I would read a chapter and then we would sit down together and go through all the things I found difficult. It worked for me at both 'O' and 'A' level, though this is years ago. I think that maybe I married a Polish teacher rather than a wife! I do not have that 'get up and go' now though.

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

It is a very good course to begin your studies of Polish and everybody has to start somewhere. Otherwise people just worry so much about which course that they never start at all. The best courses are the old ones anyway, long out of print. In Poland they produced some very fine courses with records (I still have a set). They are very good and I have never heard or seen anything better nowadays. When England had the old G.C.E. 'O'' levels standards were higher but since the emergance of the G.C.S.E.'s in the 1990's books have been rewritten in a somewhat childish fashion and that is a real shame. The original Teach Yourself book (no tapes) was a very good bookbeing written during the war years. In Moscow I had a copy annd each evening I would sit with my Polish girl friend and we would do a chapter together. People think that money and technology will buy them success but it is the work that they put in themselves that counts.

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

I simply suggested a good starting point in learning Polish words-a course entitled Eurotalkinteractive and you say that you do not recommend the course as it sounds robotic. Earlier, Matyjasz said that my Polish was good but sounded robotic so I imagine that your words are a copy of his. That is all!

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

I think that most courses which are teaching basic vocabulary will sound a bit robotic but they seem to be good at teaching someone the basics of at least how a language sounds.

There is also a Teach Yourself book with a set of tapes and a Colloquial Polish by B.W. Mazur also with tapes that is very good. I bought a brand new copy, unused for £1 pound fifty pence at my local car boot! I will never use it and you can have it for free if you want. I have even got Learn Polish Now for a computer which I never use and you can have it too. I have loads of stuff, which I will never use again and will probably throw away.


Should be just up your street then!

Language / Where can I find audio of polish words [24]

They are expensive to buy but you can go to a good library or buy in perhaps on line? There is a series called EuroTalkinteractive-I am sure that you can pick them up in Computerworld but they cost nearly 20 pounds. I have one on Maltese, which cost me one pound at a car boot! They are really good and are easy to download. If you are in the U.K you may be able to get it on order via your central library. It will teach you lots of basic words and you can slow down the speed of the recordings. There are about three different levels but for you, the basic one would be just fine.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]

Yes, I think that he is probably right. All these languages are conected in the same way as English has similarities to Dutch and then the Dutch can understand a lot of German and if you study German you should be able to at least read quite a lot of Swedish. I have looked at some Slovenian words and they are similar to Polish. Slovak is probably one of the nearest living languages to Polish. If you know Czech, you should be able to learn Serbo Croatian fairly easily as it is nearer than Polish is. I have never studied seriously Czech or Slovak but I studied Russian at university and my wife is Polish so if I had to, then I should be able to fill in most of the other slavic languages to some extent.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]


I think that Sparrow meant that Czech and Slovak are similar in the fact that they are similarly difficult to Polish and not that the two languages are the same thing.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]

Sometimes I hear Slovakian spoken in the street and it is difficult to know if it is Polish or not as it is so similar to Polish-six weeks in Slovakia and I would be fluent in this language.


Why is Czech a difficult language?

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]

Some years ago I met a lady who came from the Czech Republic as a guest of one of my friends in London. I spoke Polish and she spoke Czech as well as German (which I do not speak) and we had no problem in understanding each oother. After about twenty minutes I was understanding easily 80 per cent of all her words.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]


How can the Brits be dying out? Czech is just an old fashioned Polish country language. It is very easy to learn.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]



It is not very nice being called an ******* but the truth is is that we have many Polish people in England now-they say that we have something like 600,000 in the U.K and Ireland. As he has Polish roots then of course he can study Polish and he is free to do so. However, why so many Polish want to come to England is strange. When I was a student in Russia twenty years ago, the Polish (and there were many in Moscow at the same time) never had a single good word to say for the English. Churchill sold Poland to the Russians and so on and so on. Juz wystarczy...

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]

There are not 40 million people in Poland and I was in Radom recently and the streets on a Saturday, which used to be full are now almost empty as people have gone abroad to work and very few now return. Czech is an even smaller country though their economy is in a better shape-the language is just an old fashioned version of Polish. Languages have never been very important in the U.K but there are lots of languages in Eastern Europe not only Polish. There are many Polish people working and living abroad-where do you all think that WE come from!! We come from Czestochowa and are now in Surrey.

Language / Is it too late for me to learn Polish..? [65]

It is really a wast of your time though as the language is dying as so many of the young are moving out of Poland. A lot of work for little if any real return. What about Chinese? A very interesting country and the future world dominant power. The Poles do not even produce the Polonez motor car any more!!