Language / A little Polish grammar. Masculine, animate objects. [64]

What is confusing for first timers also can be the distinction in Slavic languages between masculine ANIMATE (NON-human) nouns, such as "pies", masculine INANIMATE, such as "samochód" vs. virile HUMAN nouns, such as "chłop" or "człowiek", not to mention but again the latter category of Polish nouns, this time though with 'feminine'-looking endings, notably "mężczyzna" etc., nonetheless declined as MASCULINE rather than feminine nouns!!

More on this topic, I'm sure:-)

What's tricky is, for example, "Widzę mój nowy stół." [= "table" - inanimate, i.e. non-human masculine accusative case], "Widzę moje psy." [= "dogs" - animate, i.e. living non-human masculine accusative case] BUT!!!: "Widzę mojEGO ojCA." (NOT: "Widzę mój ojciec.") because "father" is a living human noun and therefore requires GENITIVE case endings!!!!

Just takes oodles of practice:-)

Life / Polish programs with Polish subtitles on TVP online have disappeared... [6]

Juvenalia's fine, so long as it's "classic", or traditional and not this contemporary YA (Young Adult) garbage! I'll make a slight exception with Harry Potter. Other than that, there's little out there on a so-called more basic level which isn't sub-mental at the same time:-)

Don't be afraid to challenge yourself! Do you honestly want to sound in Polish, like so many a young Pole sound like a vulgar valley girl in English???

Life / Polish programs with Polish subtitles on TVP online have disappeared... [6]

As a Polish learner myself, I can only reiterate the personal significance of Polish-language subtitles for Polish movies. I trained my skills by watching either with Polish-language subtitles, or, (ideally) NONE at all, avoiding completely English or German captions!!!!

Tough as h**l at the beginning, but man what a difference in the end:-)

English subtitles for foreign films are also notoriously iffy! Sometimes, even while I was just starting to learn Polish, I'd be watching the movie and furiously trying to concentrate on the story/acting while reading the silly subtitles and think to myself, "Come on! Noone would say that in English!"

I'd then switch them off and probably got more of the actual dialogue than the stilted, unnatural rendering into English.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Among the Indo-European family, Baltic languages are on a par with Slavic languages both in terms of their apparent inscrutability to outsiders as well as their morphological conservatism, i.e. their propensity for retaining vestigial forms in their language, sort of the like the prehensile tail of certain contemporary fauna!

Among the Slavic sub-group, Polish is certainly among the most phonologically as well as morphologically complex.

Analogies on a scale of "difficulty" in this forum with Welsh, for example, are indeed accurate:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Davs, Denwaw!

First off, it's "Poland", furthermore, many Poles find Danish even harder to master than English:-)

That's my perspective.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Hmm, can't say as I quite blame your reaction. Anyway, let's hopefully learn from one another, in whatever the language:-)
That is after all the whole point of an open "forum", isn't it?

Back on course, the way that yours truly eventually learned Polish was through Polish movie watching WITHOUT English subtitles, employing instead POLISH-language closed captions and working my way chronologically from the late 40's through post-War Cinema up to the early 2000's! After attempting to master the language at the "organic" level of a child learning their mother tongue, I then took actual language classes for a little over four years prior to visiting Poland for the first (and unfortunately only) time in 1996. I read as much as possible and had many Polish acquaintances/clientele who preferred Polish to English:-)

That's basically it!

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Szczecianin, what seems verbose to you, is actually just being descriptive and refuses to conform to the millisecond sound byte-style of information to which most people nowadays have long since become accustomed:-)

If only to keep flogging a dead horse, English just SEEMS easy because general expectations worldwide for level of usage have declined so abysmally, that's all. Surely language "changes", but there's a difference between additions to a language which come over centuries of gradual acceptance and sheer brain-dead laziness which has led to such utter flabbiness in vocabulary that I recently read (to my delight!!!) that certain law firms in New York will in fact put employees on notice for both dressing, above all speaking, too casually, i.e using "like", "cool", "awesome", "yeah-uh" and other filler words, not to mention the f-curse.

So you see, I'm not the only oneLOL

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

....hopefully leaving their legacies to the rest of us clever ones from which we all may benefit:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

And for what forum, pray tell, would my comments be appropriate? On the contrary, the truth often seems threatening, i.e "pretentious" to those who'd just assume settle for second best! Up until round about 1970, ball park, news broadcasters on TV, e.g. the late, great Charles Collingwood, Walter Cronkite etc.. would interview guests, and one of them i particular (John Stevenson) would even gently but audibly recast a guest's faulty grammar for the purposes of bothe aesthetics as well as clarity.

Where are such men today?

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Szczeczinianin, your comments are as much a reflection of the times we live in as they are of my posts. As expectation levels of language and culture have declined over the past half century or so, what was not to long ago deemed witty, enjoyable and well written, is now perceived (incorrectly, I might add!) as stuffy, pretentious and silly.

Sadly, we're living in a garden of saplings where once a forest of mighty Redwoods blossomed. Polish of today in movies ("Zmróż oczy") is scarcely comparable with that of "Popiół i diamanty", the English of "Perry Mason" on US TV some fifty years ago is so far superior in both acting as well as dialogue compared with nowadays, it's practically as joke to compare the two!

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Then I must take issue with your observation/opinion:-)

One person's pretension is another's effortless fluidity and erudite expression.

Polish is "hard" only relative to one's ability in the language, that's all.

Szczecinianin, the language "easiest" to communicate in though, may not necessarily be the language that is spoken best. The interlocutor's refusal therefore may result in a mere approximation instead of a seemless transference of ideas. Where once, a Polish or other scientist coming to the States might have hired out an interpreter to speak through a more fluent mouthpiece, nowadays, that same scientist prefers to mangle the English language instead:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Aptly stated, old man! Spot on as well.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Academic, I think you mean. For either a foreign-born, non-native English speaker, or most people under thirty, maybe so. For educated, over fourty, native-born speakers of North American Standard, I beg seriously to differ!

Law / International student from Poland traveling to Norway on Karta Pobytu? [54]

For the general tourist perhaps you're right. For the long-term sojourner, it may be a different story.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

I actually couldn't concur with you more, Jon. My ire though is raised when, for example, various European nationalities in particular (and I think we all know which ones!!) appear on the one hand to blatantly discourage foreign visitors from attempting to speak their language, claiming that it sounds awful, at the same time, being encouraged by tongue-tied foreigners to by all means speak English, even though the English that person is speaking is usually MISspoken, hence, the double-standard; it's okay for Norwegians, as one example, to try to mimic the "cool" American idiom with some success, but it's somehow not okay for, say, an American of some language talent to try to mimic native Norwegian speech.

Something's cockeyed about this logic.

Law / International student from Poland traveling to Norway on Karta Pobytu? [54]

By what yardstick then do you measure "interesting", jon? Majestic fjordscapes, cradle-to-grave security, fresh air and plenty of it, literate conversation etc.... Doesn't sound half bad to me, old boy:-)

Oh well, I guess there's the downside too - the smug, homogeneous descendents of Vikings, arrogant about their democracy while valiantly struggling with ethnic diversity... Mixed bag, I suppose.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Try telling that to the average pupil of English! Most often, one hears either vulgarity maskerading as "communicativeness" read "naturalness", or, the 'stilted precision' you mention; there seems precious little in betweenLOL

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

As a language instructor of many years, I agree partially, Szczecinanin. Surely for the adult learner, a basic knowledge of grammar is essential, even in the very beginning. While it's true that it's more important at the start to focus on communicative utterances, i.e. daily wishes, desires etc.., being without a solid grounding in the grammar of any language makes one sound rather like a Neanderthal.

Surely this is not desirable:-)

Law / International student from Poland traveling to Norway on Karta Pobytu? [54]

....stave churches, world-class universities, the country of Grieg, Ibsen and Munk.....
Need I go on??
:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

There's a delightful series by Prof. Jan Miótek for Polish as both a first as well as a foreign language. Similar to Mark Twain's infamous "The Awful German Language", Professor Miótek's short volume "Polski - Straszny język" is rife with all the hideously difficult conundra of Polish, presented in a humorous way.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

which further serves to expand on the point I was illustrating:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Ahemm, eh, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are up there as well:-)

One of the problems with Polish (and again, by no means confined to Polish!) is its highly conservative morphology, telicity and prosody which it shares with many of the above languages:-) Slavic aspect is mostly unfamiliar to career Romanists or even Germanists, unless of course they've studied linguistics which touches on the major language groups. The humorous cartoon shown prior illustrates the degree of case application in Polish, though once more, scarcely unique to that language.

Celticists tend to be more used to the sorts of consonantal mutations found in Polish, as Welsh for example, is practically crawling with the buggersLOL

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

I found Polish MUCH easier to pronounce in the beginning than Russian, primarily owing to the strongly palatalized consonants , 'd' and 't' in Russian compared with Polish:-)

The syllabic stress of Russian I also found harder.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Jardinero, I for one am familiar with this site resp. webpage and find that the identical criteria for difficulty might apply to any one of a dozen or so languages, hardly exclusive to Polish!

Polonia / I'm going to study in Germany (speaking English / money transfers) [24]

DeborahR,

Although I've only been to the airport in Oslo, but spent considerable time in Denmark, I nonetheless found (as I suspected long before I'd left the States) that it was exceedingly important to know the local lingo in order to have any sort of half-way meaningful encounter with a local!

As a young man at the time travelling through Scandinavia and armed with fluent Danish, passible Swedish and a reading knowledge of Bokmaal, if nothing more, it made my encounters with native speakers, particularly female, ever so much more rewarding. They didn't assume "Oh, geez! Here's just another Homer-Simpson-type guy trying to pick me up!"

In Germany, I found a fluent knowledge of German a must! Germans, unlike Poles or Scandinavians I've found, presume that if someone says "they're fluent in German", then, they are FLUENT in the language and not merely exaggerating. Pity such thinking doesn't as often apply to EnglishLOL

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Learning Polish will naturally prove essential when dealing with Polish people, within as well as outside Poland! EVERY language out there, either extinct or extant, is both "easy" and "difficult" simultaneously, all depending upon both the learner's relationship to it, along with the level of communication desired. If the bare-bones minimum is all that is required, learning to pronounce correctly a handful of useful Polish phrases might indeed prove useful. If a true understanding of the society from the ground up, so to speak, is the goal, then the texture(s) of the Polish tongue in this case, should be mastered completely. This of course can and often does take many years of serious, concerted effort and almost monastic devotion. Furthermore, don't worry all too much about getting each of the myriad declensions and assorted morphological/orthographical permutations of Polish!! Even some of us who've been studying it, using it, professionally for a long time, continue to make mistakes ^^

I assume your purposes lie somewhere in between, yes?:-)

Another thing, try NOT to rely on local English knowledge! Even in other European countries which have allegedly "fluent" English speakers on every corner, often their English is limited at best, or inaccurate, to say the very leastLOL

Work / Moving to Poland from Iceland (salary of 6500 pln a month) - can I build a house? [25]

Rabbi, I presume your wife will help you with Polish once you get settled:-)
Unlike in Iceland, you may not find the average person on the street who is able to understand English fluently, except probably in the capital and then mostly in heavily tourist areas.

Language / Polish and Hungarian, how similar? [53]

Correct, SpaceCadet!

Nonetheless from a purely linguistic perspective, both Polish and Hungarian (compared with Modern, not Old English) are synthetic as opposed to analytic languages, evidenced in their use of morphological inflections to register relationships rather than applying already existing words, e.g. Pol. Jestem na wŚI. > wieś [spelling change registers case morphology] = Hung. WidekBEN [post- vs. prepositional signal of case change] = Engl. I am IN THE country. [zero change of any forms, relationship signaled instead by the preposition "in" + definite article "the", neither of which mutate form, including the noun "country"]

Work / Moving to Poland from Iceland (salary of 6500 pln a month) - can I build a house? [25]

I was told once (perhaps facetiously!) that all native-born Icelanders know English, except for the taxi drivers around the airport in Reykjavik:-)

What's more of a mindbender (ćwiczenie umyślowe, though not literally of course ^^), a Pole bothering to learn Icelandic or vice-versa?
LOL