News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

Soros is particularly toxic, I concur:-) He's purely a money-games guy who's got more money than the Vatican, Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg put together, yet remains curiously and noticably dissatisfied!

News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

See you're an alternative facts man, eh?
lol

News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

As our US news headlines appear to suggest, Brexit is turning out sadly to be more of a messy divorce from Bruxelles, rather than merely an amicable parting of the ways with Europe:-)

PM May's made her own cot and now she's going to have to sleep in it....with NO HELP from Merkel, Hollande or the rest of the Continent either!

News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

Only "Poland" is NEVER written with a lower-case "P"!

News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

One can speak about "telephone poles" and be referring to the actual objects, not to a Pole employed by the phone company.

News / How will BREXIT affect the immigrants in UK and Poland. [1114]

More a proviso, than an out-and-out warning, NoToForeigners.

Marsupial ought to watch what he wishes for; he might get it:-)

A word to the wise!

Travel / Warsaw in May, Auschwitz, Kantor in Old Town [33]

Regrettably, a number of such sites have indeed morphed into a kind of Disneyland set a la 'Schindler's List' and such pains me no end!

Partially though, the Polish gov't.'s to blame for capitalizing on all this unthinkable commercialism. Finally, Auschwitz, Belżec, Treblinka, Majdanek, and the whole unspeakable rest, are cemetaries, graveyards and hence eternal memorials to the seamless capacity for man to behave as LESS than the very animals to which he claims superiority!

Disco plans for Auschwitz???!!! (Later scrapped, thank heaven). A snack bar etc. in Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald??!

Would anyone here ever think to have same at a regular cemetary here in the States, or any place else for that matter?

So why the double standard in this case?

Travel / Warsaw in May, Auschwitz, Kantor in Old Town [33]

With the gentle suggestion to defer a "visit" to Auschwitz, I can only concur:-)

Any memorial site trip of this nature cannot humanely, nor should it for purposes of conscience, ever be undertaken lightly, people!
I made the tactical error of trying to combine a stop over at Dachau while visiting Munich once and it turned out to be a mistake.

After the visit, I wasn't the same for days, I was distracted and out of sorts, plus, having been lodging with an older German family who might well have been a part of the whole ghastly business didn't make things any easier.

Vsiting Warszawa? Stick with Warszawa; you'll get a lot more out of the whole experience.

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Nor tell him that his Pilsner's "stały" and that his home has a pleasant "zapach":-))))!!!

You'll quickly find you've overstayed your welcome by several minutes and countingLOL

Travel / Warsaw in May, Auschwitz, Kantor in Old Town [33]

I would advise against traveling to Auschwitz aka Oświęcim period unless you intend to devote the bulk of your stay to such a wrenching pilgrimage!

A KZ-site ISN'T just another tourist stop, you know. At least show some respect for the murdered dead, if not for the suffering living.

Life / Multiracial Poles [154]

Polish-Columbian/American isn't that uncommon where we used to live:-)

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Always good to know, thank you.

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Would for instance "sukienka" be translated as "dress" or "blouse" or neither of the above?

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Scores of my German ESL'ers will often (stereo-)typically repeat, "I eventually think we solve our problems, though my facts are not actual." etc..

Distinguishing false from true friends appears to be a lifetime effort:-)

Poles too will say: "I didn't could found the word in my dictionary." etc.. Transference/interference errors are among the most common for foreign language learners!

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

So interesting how meanings change for nearly like-sounding words in other languages:-)
"Kapelusz" for example, must derive from "chapeau".

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

As is German "Bluson"! Far from a "blouse", instead it's a type of outerwear, something between a jacket and an overcoat, worn by both men and women:-)

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

I quite agree with you, Paulina!

Admitting though to limited contact with the opposite sex in Poland, I base my conclusions solely on personal observation and cross-cultural seminars in which I've participated over the years:-)

Polish women, as do Czechs, often come across to me as both physically and socially far more mature than corresponding American teens and twenty-somethings here in the States.

The ESL courses which I teach often have students from many countries and the Poles are frequently the least shy about expressing their opinions, compared with most Asians, for example.

In Japan, for instance, laughter surely does mask nervousness and discomfort!

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

There you go! Such faux amis are the stuff which make language learning both fun and practical.

I must have mentioned my own similar (yet less invasive) false friend pickle I found myself in when in Czech Republic some years back, whereupon I totally innocently remarked, thinking in Polish, that I thought my host's beer was stale and that his house smelled:-)

Both never quite got over that one, but rest assured, yours truly never made the same mistake AGAIN!!!

@NoToForeigners,
Sir, you are nothing other than a contrarian. Certainly my Polish could stand continued improvement, yet so could the English of both yourself and some others here on PF. DIfference being that I'm grateful for correction, while you aren't.

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

When in Italy last, quite some time ago, the Italian ladies whom I encountered in Rome as well as elsewhere during my visit were fiercely interactive with one another, less with myself. While I don't wish to generalize either about Italians, Poles, Germans or whomever, Italians on the whole I found to be quite up front in their conversation, not "direct" in the sense of blunt or rude, not at all. On the contrary, the all seemed eager to practice their minimal English with me and were dying to find out why I wanted to come to Italy:-) My Italian was so limited, I tried countering with high school French as a foil to their "Italianese". This was a mistake, but then, when one's a teen, no one really cares, and so we had a blast with a lot of pointing, play acting, and sure, loads of laughterLOL

Latins though are often more given to open displays of joy and sadness, much more so than, say, Poles, Swedes or certain other Northern Europeans!

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

NoToForeigners,

Indeed it does! For this reason, I "go ballistic", as the saying goes, whenever I read your, Crow's, Ironside's or Wulkan's English-language posts because they are typically littered with mistakes which they claim are not important:-) I at least admit to error when I'm at fault, even in my mother tongue(s).

Learning correct English requires the same degree of diligence as learning Polish. The former being an analytic language, simply reduced the morphological complexity of a language like Polish.

As I've often said, another excellent learning aid is watching Polish TV without English subtitles, but instead, with Polish captions in order to see what the speakers are saying!!

@Delph, thanks! I meant to indicate with "Silesian" any and all formerly German-speaking regions of Poland in which spillover loan translation words were/are still used.

I've done same for other languages and it really works.

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

...derived from the German "Bahn", and used solely among Silesian dialect speakers:-)

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

Perhaps the reason why many Europeans imagine we Americans to be a rather stupid, at best, a fatuous lot! We often smile a lot at complete strangers in the belief that this somehow wins "friends" and draws us all a little closer together.

I think it was the late comedian/comic performer Victor Borge of Denmark who once observed "A smile is the shortest distance between two people."

Maybe the distance has grown even longer as we speak:-)

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

The Dutch, on the other hand, I found to be blunt as a spoon, direct to a fault, something perhaps occasional "superficial" laughter, at least a smile, wouldn't cure:-)

Dat is maar een grappje. Just jokingLOL

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

It's "Angielpolski", that's all, like "Engleutsch" for the Germans, "Franglais" for the French.....

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

Poles in my experience, both in Poland as well as abroad, tend to be slightly reserved, guarded, almost intentionally mysterious, the men along with the women:-)

Perhaps too, as younger, attractive Polish women seem to be pursued by this reputation for being "dumb", "loose", and "available", while many indeed have higher university degrees, well-paying careers (though still lagging behind men in pay big time), a great many want to fight this persistent image of being put on earth solely for men's pleasure, and so will often affect a spikey toughness and cocky intellectual self confidence, preferring NOT to laugh "too much" for fear of being seen as too available, therefore "unserious"!

This is my take anyway.

Love / Why the Polish girls are not laughing? [22]

Wulkan, I'm not even going to comment on such pure ludicrousness! Your sentence would mean "Is your vision (seeing aka sight) funny?" Perhaps you can explain to yourself what that means and thereby justify your poor command of certain parts of English or some sucker, a second-language English speaker as well, but hardly to someone who's native tongue is English and is not rationalizing:-)

Why not fess up to yourself about the state of your English, as I do about my Polish? Your sentence would be like my saying, for instance, Ja chcę zjawić piękny widok." etc. The words are Polish, but the sense is plain gibberish. Your word order is pure English, only the meaning leaves us scratching our heads.

Anyone who says differently is having you on, fella!!!

Law / Residence permit in Poland. Starting an own business is enough to get this? [14]

Poles are slowly growing tired of their country being used as, what many see, as a sort of dumping ground for cheap, foreign labor.
DominicB's absolutely correct in his judgement:-)

As far as "lazy English" therein lies the double standard, as I seriously doubt whether or not I with my "lazy" Spanish could even think seriously about getting a respectable position teaching Spanish in PeruLOL

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Your son is quite fortunate, Polonius! My mother too insisted that I grow up with at least two languages.

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Yep, sort of the same way I learned SwedishLOL

Two semesters at grad school behind me, knew squat before I went over to the country, and had a good enough accent I guess so that literally NOONE in all of Goteborg spoke to me in English for nearly the entire week of my initial stay:-) My conversational ability took off like a rocket and remains fairly active until today.

By the time I got to Poland, some ten years later, I was savvy enough to have learned both the language as well as the basics of the culture. There though, the difference was that I had to communicate in Polish as nobody in Szczcecin at the time would even admit to speaking English (or German)!

Language / Polish - Absolute Beginner Questions. Study plan. [75]

Agree, Polonius! Furthermore, it goes without saying that such labels should ONLY contain the Polish word, zero translation, otherwise the poor learner will continue to do little but keep translating back into their native language and won't really learn to think in Polish:-)

Famous Russian-American language buff/pedagogue, Boris Shekman, just passed yesterday. What I as a career language instructor found fascinating in his obit. was his method of getting ordinary Joes, along with top US-diplomats, to converse in "real" colloquial Russian, something they never learned in college courses.

He stressed the "be thrown into cold water head first" approach, that is, being tossed into a solely target-language speaking situation where NOBODY speaks or understands English.

Sink or swim!