Double meanings, Polish slang and embarrassment

Good for you, neither do I-:)))))

I like this sentence hehe :-)

Its better to listen to native speakers than trying to read phonetic rules.

Thanks Szwede. You are correct but even listening to native speakers I pick up the pronunciation wrong at times, I need to be told. Before I was leaving out the p at the start of words until someone corrected me, rzeprazsam instead of przepraszam etc. A Polish guy once commented that I spoke Polish like a deaf person, he wasn't so far off the mark because my hearing isn't perfect. :-)

With the way I sometimes mispronounce words in Polish; I'll probably never order a pizza in Poland. Don't even want to open that can of worms!

old story, first time in warsaw, asked to see an old mans breasts........................I meant the Polish for "first", it came out,er,wrong..............

Both actions are indespensable if one wishes to pronounce the sounds of a foreign language correctly. You may listen to native speakers and it may be in vain for arriving at pronouncing a sound correctly.

"I pick up the pronunciation wrong at times, I need to be told" is an esential statement to this. Books on phonetics may explain the difference, but only repeated exercise will make you perfect.

Here is an example from my own experience: Back in the 1980s I was trying to tell someone in the north of England about our food rationing system under the communist regime in Poland at that time. I used the term "ration cards" in which term I was recklessly pronouncing the Polish 'a' in the word "ration". However, the 'a' we have in Polish is not at all like any one of the two 'a' they have in English. The person I was talking to was getting it as "Russian cards" rather than "ration cards", but he realized what I had meant and repeated "ration" and "Russian" to me several times to much amusement of other British persons engaged in that conversation, and to much embarassment for myself who not only read about this distinction before, but had once gone through a series of phonetic contrastive exercises on the one-year long BBC TV English language course "Slim John".

I wouldnt worry too much about english pronunciation "oop north" mate, we all talk funny anyway :)
But can someone explain to Poles that we dont pronounce every single letter in our words ? especially those letters you seem proud of being able to change from the Polish to english...like W in sword....,its "Sord" not "Sward" ;)

Even in the north of England you may occasionally find people who speak excellent standard English as did Reverened J.S. of the Scottish United Reformed Church that I was talking to... ;)


Neither do we as shown in your post on 'pierwsi' vs. 'piersi' ('pierwsi' will be pronounced 'piersi' in normal speech).

Saying pierWsi is not normal? I would rather say it's utter sloppiness to say "piersi" instead of pierwsi.


Could you give other examples of common mispronounciation commited by Poles? I knew from movies that British say something like "soooord" but I always thought that sword is also correct. Good to know.

a movie started on tv.

i said in english. ''oh! this must be the szyc movie''

had to quickly do it again and insert 'borys'

I don't get it...

an in-law thought i said 'shits'

I used to think that the guys at work were talking about women's breasts until I found out they were only asking each other if it was the first or 2nd time the buzzer had gone off, was it time to start working. They talked about it every day but guys could talk about either topic everyday.


I agree

It maybe was at some point inour dim and distant past but no,the W is effectivley silent.


Not off the top of my head,but to be a little contraversial,Poles do seem to be convinced that they speak english with a perfect accent when in fact,to most people unfamiliar with the language they kinda still sound like Count Dracula ;)

But,again,dont worry about it, we have so many very distinctive native english ( and British) accents that we are used to words being pronunced differently and frankly no one worries if you have an accent or not apart from a few dumb bigots,but who cares what they think eh? IMHO its not pronuncing english thats a problem but figuring out just which meaning for a word we mean;" They're over there putting polish on their Polish boots"........:)


Yes,but atleast Polish seems to have hard and fast rules,where as with english you often simply have to know the word .

One of the funniest things of ELT in Krakow region class:

Boots sounds the same as Polish buc [buts}- taboo word which is stronger than asshole. Whenever I teach this word in lower grades, we can`t stop laughing for a few minutes.

Pawian, quick question - what ages are you teaching?

From 3 to 63. I am a Universal Sol... Teacher. :):):):)

It depends on region.
In Lesser Poland, where Kraków lies, buc is a serious offence that means a part of male genitalia and can be roughly translated as ''dick''. It's a cracovian equivalent of chuj.

In other parts of Poland, however, it means an impolite, ill-mannered person (cham, prostak, burak) or a conceited or arrogant person, bighead (zarozumialec, pyszałek) - still not a nicest term, but it's generally not considered as a curse word for penis, like in Kraków.