Life / Is there any other native English people living in Poland [8]


Or just say "Mówmy po polsku, muszę się nauczyć" or just do what I used to do, just keeping Polish even if they answer in English... they usually gave up pretty soon.


The relevant distinction is Polska A and Polska B

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_A_and_B

Life / Is there any other native English people living in Poland [8]


Not directly, but have you watched this lady's videos? They're more directed to Russian speakers (probably a majority of her students) but she's very clear and describes the format of the test pretty well.

youtube.com/watch?v=l-53N4uIT0Q&list=PLMAH1yXs7BSEr_On-pSjnzXYvhK8wQYw8

This video is in (Mexican) Spanish but has subtitles in Polish

youtube.com/watch?v=VBW8L4mlVGo

Law / Unwanted pregnancy in Poland - threats, rights [55]


: o it does make for nicer wedding gowns....

Law / Unwanted pregnancy in Poland - threats, rights [55]

That's what I meant, I'm talking about unconscious attitudes rather than something people talk about. I remember a few years ago at a botanical garden where a lot of couples came to get wedding pictures taken... and every single 'bride' was visibly pregnant.

Law / Unwanted pregnancy in Poland - threats, rights [55]


And therein lies your downfall.

I would insist on a paternity check, women that purposefully deceive men to get access to their resources aren't above outsourcing the actual impregnation....


Traditionally in Poland if singles begin a sexual relationship then the unspoken agreement was that pregnancy would lead to marriage (the percentage of visibly pregnant brides used to be.... very high). Foreigners are usually unaware of this and it leads to.... situations.... that are not..... good.

Classifieds / Polish lessons via Skype offer [19]


Those who just don't like Polish as a language..... or regard it as a necessary evil.


Every single excuse for not becoming reasonably fluent (able to read newspapers, understand the news, deal with the bureaucracy without an interpreter) comes down to some combination of dumb (including intellectual stagnation) and laziness. There's also personal dislike but that raises the question of why someone would remain in a language environment that's unpleasant for them? I like French much less than other Romance languages which is the main reason I wouldn't want to live there (though Spain, Italy, Portugal or even Romania would be fine).

Classifieds / Polish lessons via Skype offer [19]


Yes the participants here either already know Polish pretty well or don't want to.. maybe at one time but that was a long time ago.

Real Estate / Victorian-style house in Poland? [15]


Poland by and large looks to the west. It hasn't drunk the multi-culti cool-aid but it's far less homogenous than it used to be and British people aren't considered exotic... weird and misguided in many ways, but not exotic.

Do what you want but the people that live here think the idea of trying to build an outwardly looking British house here is.... kind of..... how do I put this?..... Daft? Yes, that's it. Daft.

Real Estate / Victorian-style house in Poland? [15]


Exactly, can you imagine trying to get Polish builders to build such a thing?

The only possible option would be if some British company is trying to sell British style houses in Poland (like the 'Canadian' houses some years ago). But I don't think Polish people like British home design any more than they like the food..

Real Estate / Victorian-style house in Poland? [15]

If the house is being built you can negotiate some changes. A friend's first apartment purchased while being finished had some walls and doors moved around from the original plan, so ... yes.

Real Estate / Victorian-style house in Poland? [15]


I doubt it. It would make more sense to look at floor plans that are easily available and choose the one that's closest to what you want, especially if you don't speak Polish.

I speak Polish and shudder at the thought of trying to explain an exotic building plan to Polish builders.

Put 'plan szeregowca' into google images and look at what comes up.

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


You can go anywhere you want within the law, but there's no legal right to be able to go anywhere by car.

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


Irrelevant to questions of traffic fines.. I have no desire to drive in Poland so I don't know the fines or points. What I can observe is that a lot of the worst drivers are in the most expensive cars. If a particular fine is 200 zl (wild guess) they don't care. If that were raised to 2000 they might...

There's no inherent right to drive (where I'm from DMV employees always said 'driving privilege') so a sliding scale of fines seems reasonable.

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


There's been talk of making fines proportional to income so that fines would be a percentage of income rather than fixed fees. I generally approve. Polish drivers are generally bad, not awful, not the worst I've seen (that would probably be Malta) but lots of bad habits from weird driving instruction and a toxic car culture.

It has improved some but not enough and not fast enough for my taste.

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]

True, but 30 years after the fall of communism and some bad effects linger.... Poles were conditioned to mistrust any information from the government and so public service campaigns aren't so effective. There are no institutions that have the public's confidence and so certain types of publicity are harder to carry off than in countries unburdened by the PRL past.

Life / TIL Rzeszow got an airport decades before larger Lublin [13]


EU funding and maybe.... rhymes with Pomeranians....

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


I palm wave after they've stopped (I'm not sure if that's a widely understood thing in Poland... but it's automatic and not something I plan).

I used to be able to use my death stare to shame them into stopping... it's hard to describe it's just something I use to do (the shoulder and neck posture were also important), more than one person walking with me was surprised at how effective it was

Where I am more often than drivers are pretty good at stopping for pedestrians, not perfect but a big improvement over even a few years ago. Wwa which is ruder and cruder than the provinces (like almost all capital cities) might be different.

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


Yes, I always wait to see the car is serious about stopping before stepping in front of it. Not everyone does that...

News / New Polish traffic laws [25]


Just last week I was stopped on the sidewalk by a local TV crew asking about that very question. Since I had no desire to be on tv I just gave the flattest most boring answers possible.

As far as accidents go pedestrian safety is a two way street. Yeah, there are lots of bad/crazy/rude drivers around but if you actually look before crossing rather than take it on faith that cars will stop for you a lot of accidents can be prevented.

News / Will Poland tighten border control with Germany? [60]

Don't look now, but kids with 'migration backgrounds' are dragging down Germany's Pisa scores... human beings are not interchangeable widgets that can be moved around with no consequence. And Germany won't be able to maintain its current economy if the percentage of migrants drastically increases....

zeit.de/gesellschaft/schule/2019-12/pisa-studie-schulleistungen-oecd-risikoschueler-schulsystem

Language / Interslavic artificial language [35]


I used to think so too, but Slovak is a lot easier for Poles to understand

News / Will Poland tighten border control with Germany? [60]


Poland and Ukraine are far closer culturally and linguistically than the US and Mexico. Some Ukrainian men look a bit rougher than average Polish guys but about 99% of the time you can't tell they're Ukrainian until they open their mouths... so not that equivalent to Mexicans in the US.

Also there's not much of a welfare social safety net in Poland so those coming over are almost all doing so to work legitimately. The country seems to be genuinely turning from the Soviet past and I remain hopeful about its future. The biggest problem is corruption at all levels of society but that takes generations to address and not just a few years.

As for crime, I think the situation is probably similar to post USSR people in Poland in the early 1990s, as long as the crime stayed inside the foreigners' group the police took a hands off attitude and only cracked down if they started victimizing citizens.

News / Will Poland tighten border control with Germany? [60]


Internal Schengen borders, but open external borders are a nightmare... (see 2015...) especially if a country is very incompetent when it comes to deporting people that need to be deported (lookin' at you Deutschland).

Again, you can have no borders inside and strong borders outside or you can have weak borders outside but then you need stronger borders inside.

Language / Unknown language of old prayer from grandparents - they spoke a mixture of Polish, Slovak & Hungarian [15]


The weird thing for me was the pronunciation of mój and stój as closer to moj and stoj... it's easy to believe that some dialect has the pronuncations though.

But still very recognizable for someone who presumably had no idea what he was saying, his babcia taught him that prayer very well.


you're probably no longer around but in more modern Polish 'baba' became a not very polite word for 'woman', not obscene or that crude but not very polite either, maye a little like 'broad' in older American English.

News / Will Poland tighten border control with Germany? [60]


People claiming to be refugees, most had no legtimiate claim.


then don't let them have the run of the place while they're being processed... there was a German article not long ago that many, once refused asylum in Germany just go to another country and try there (or spell their name a bit differently a go somewhere else in Germany).

How is that sustainable?

the 1951 convention was written for a different reality and needs to be drastically updated. Not to mention the fact that the current law give aid and succor to the worst kinds of human traffickers. Why is the EU so determined to keep the human trafficking rings up and running?

News / Will Poland tighten border control with Germany? [60]


Internal borders in the EU can only remain open if the external borders are tightened up more than a little. Given the western European tendency to let in tens or hundreds of thousands of unvetted young men from some the most chaotic and dysfunctional parts of the world is a poison pill for freedom of movement.

Open internal borders or open external borders.... you can only get one.

Language / Interslavic artificial language [35]


A brilliant name, actually since "tube" is an old informal American way of referring to TV, vaguely similar to telly in the UK.

There's also "the boob tube"* (where boob means 'fool, idiot')

So, the initial American audience would make the connection youtube = TV where you (the viewer) make the content. I don't know how other English speaking countries understood it and most other languages just took it over as a mono-morphemic loan.

*There's aslo "idiot box" and I have the idea 'boob tube' was a rhyming version of that, the idiots in both cases referred to the mass audience, the type of people who can't distinguish tv from reality.

Language / Unknown language of old prayer from grandparents - they spoke a mixture of Polish, Slovak & Hungarian [15]


Sounds like Polish more than anything though the vowels are wonky, probably a version of this:

pacierz.pl/aniele-bozy.php

Aniele Boży (ModlitwaA do Anioła Stróża)

Aniele Boży, stróżu mój,
Ty zawsze przy mnie stój.
Rano, wieczór, we dnie, w nocy
Bądź mi zawsze ku pomocy,
Strzeż duszy, ciała mego,
zaprowadź mnie do żywota wiecznego.

Quick and very rough translation

Angel of God (prayer to a guardian angel)

Angel of god, my guardian
Always stand beside me.
Morning, evening, in day and night
Always be (ready) to help
Guard my soul, my body
Lead me to the enternal gate

There's probably a more polished translated out there.

News / Poland one step closer to visa waiver by US Senate [59]

There was an article explaining that several large companies (one being Lot IIRC) were sending employees to the US on 'official' business to manipulate the numbers.

I remember when there were long lines outside the embassy waiting to pay the visa application fee and those disappeared a long time ago, so less revenue...

News / Poland one step closer to visa waiver by US Senate [59]


Well the visa operation probably had been operating at a loss (visa fees are one of the sources of funding for diplomatic services) so why maintain it? In PR terms I think it was kind of a dud though... it just isn't as big a deal as it would have been 15 or even 10 years ago.


Yes, "diplomatic acumen" is your middle name!