Czech language sounds like baby talk to most Poles. Similarities?

...not to mention the uncounted false friends between the two languages (as previously posted by yours truly) aka "staly" ("permanent" in Polish, "stale" in CzechLOL) or "szukac" ("to look for, search" in Polish, something rather salacious in Czech) etc...

Staly is stały

Though not with the same meaning in Czech:-)

To me Slavic languages that always put the stress at the beginning (Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian...) sound more harsh than those that have it later in words (Polish) or in different places (Bulgarian, Russian). Polish sounds more pleasant to my Bulgarian ears than Czech and Slovak, the same way Serbo-Croatian sounds too rought compared to Bulgarian and Russian. Polish is more sing-sobgy usually.

Czech sounds kind of like baby talk to Poles. I've heard it's how Czechs perceive Polish, too.

Stały (Polish) and staly (Czech) have the same meaning.

Anyway would a one-year exposure to Slovak and several months to Czech all around me help me in learning Polish? To me Slovaks and Czechs sound pissed off most of the time, not so with Poles.

Can't comment really on Czech, as I've so rarely heard it. However, Polish usually sounds (spoken by both men and women) somewhat chirpy, upbeat, excitable.

By contrast Russian, for instance, reminds one more of a viscous river, oozing ahead ever so slowly and deliberately:-)

Actually it might make it a bit harder. I knew somebody who learned Czech first and got terribly confused when she started learning Polish as there were so many similar words, she couldn't remember which was which and ended up frequently speaking a weird polyglot mixture, full of errors.

Exactly, like those false friend "cognate" examples I gave the other day:-)

Too bad Polish is the only Slavic language using w for v and sz, cz, ż, ź.
I hate š, č, ž, they look too clumsy/ugly with that hat. Only good is they save space but I prefer using the Polish script when transliterating my cyrillic-based language when texting.

Well at least Serbians make use of the ć, but they also have the č. And somehow "w" makes more sense to me for a Slavic language.

Nice post, Joss. Thanks!

@Joss
Since you use the cyrillic I assume your mother tongue is Slavic. It'll be helpful.
No need to learn another Slavic language just to understand Polish.