What do you like in Polish language?

I am. But, as the mods just reminded us, I will not elaborate.
To my ear, Polish is almost as painful as German. Whoever invented the word "czcze" should have been shot next day to prevent more of such gifts from hell from polluting the language that was already full of the of sounds you get when you slide a metal comb over the blackboard.

It's precisely those consonant clusters which give Polish, like Czech, her special beauty. German does tend to be more on the sibilant side, I agree with you completely:-) Polish struents are more numerous than in English, hence Polish as well as German gained the of course undeserved reputation of being somehow "harsh-sounding" languages, even though certain Romance languages such as Spanish often can sound like a machine gun, rat-a-tat-tat.

I agree that Polish is an attractive language to listen to and attempt to speak, but for me the main problem is the orthography. Most of the Slavic languages, such as Czech, Slovak, Croatian, have a level of similarity, but the writing system in Czech for example seems easier for English speakers to come to terms with. The Czech use accents whereas the Poles seem to use a multiplicity of consonants, which can be daunting. I think there is a university or a uni dept in Warsaw that studies Slavonic languages as a whole. It would be interesting to know who, how and why determined the different ways of spelling what are very similar words.

Also reading the thread, I was not aware there was a quite distinct speech in Silesia (Slask?). I have been there. I do know it formerly had a lot of Germans and was partof Germany for a while....or am I wrong. An interesting region because of its strong industrial base.

For example, in standard Polish, the only word for "train" is "P - O - C - I - A - G", whereas in former Silesia aka "Schlesien" (today "Slask"), the local dialect

word is "B - A - N - A", straight from the German "Bahn"!

To follow up a bit, actually, Polish has those diacritical marks as well, only they mutate differently from Czech. Furthermore, Polish of course never has those acute accents over vowels, ONLY attached to some of the consonants:-)

Well after WWII standard Polish steamrolled over a lot of traditional dialects and most of them became accents rather than dialects. Silesian still has some distinct dialects but not everybody uses them or agrees what makes them distinct....

My favorites are the ones that use -ch in the first person past - byłech etc.

Polish (as we know it today) was first standardised in the late 1700's, then again in 1936 (to try and unify the mess that existed as a result of the partitions and the language diverging as a result, though I think there was also some squabbling going on between rival centres of the Polish language) and then post-WW2 with the Communists introducing universal free school education.

On the other hand, it was Jan Hus who brought about many of the innovations to the (then) Bohemian language, including the use of the hacek and accents.

One thing that it's important to note is that the accent plays a different role in Polish than in Czech.

Oh, I'd almost forgotten! A colleague from Southern Poland, not far from Zakopane once referred to a "zegarek" (watch, as opposed to "zegar", clock) as a "godzinek".

How cute, huh?
:-)

Thanks, Delphadomine! Nice follow up.

Train is 'cug' in Silesian afaik.
Most Silesians speak standard Polish as well as Silesian and slonsko godko is mostly used at home or among friends/natives to Silesia.

What I like about Polish is our 'r'.

Gosh, thanks so much kaprys!

Guess, I must have heard a much older dialect speaker then:-)
The Polish trilled "r" certainly is one of its most distinctive features. Especially tough for Poles to
pronounce the somewhat flat-sounding 'flap' -r sound of the English, much less the total
absence of the US "r trill. Polish "r" in almost all positions of a word is so trilled, exceptions of course being
words like "gorze" etc. in which the "r" becomes almost swallowed.