Poles struggle with English vowels

And so freaking WRONG. Embarrassingly wrong. God alone knows what you sound like when you're speaking! Poles struggle to get to grips with the English short 'u' and the 'aw' sound. I think it's because you genuinely don't the hear the difference. Now that's ok, but to be boasting about how easy something is when you can't do it..........

Your written English is very good, almost excellent though you do make a lot of very elementary mistakes when you get excited or upset. But your spoken English........woah!


I think you mean native English speakers, not 'the English' as English is the first language of many nationalities. It is special in its remarkable flexibility and the richness of its dialects. It's simply amazing when you stop to think about it that each English speaking nation has not only the Standard dialect which they use for business and formal purposes but an extraordinary breadth of individual vernacular forms. Also I think the ability to create tone, atmosphere, subtext etc through the choice of vocabulary and syntax really sets English apart. It's a beautiful language and I say that as an Irish person who loves my own native language (although I was verboten by Mein Komandant to ever speak it, the cheek of you. Quite the little imperialist aren't we).

Polish is a monocentric language with a single standard form (that almost all speakers aspire to speak). English is pluricentric with many standards (and no signs of conversion) and many speakers do not really aspire to speak the standard of their country.

There is no single English vowel system but rather a bunch of systems that only partly overlap and the distribution of vowels also differs (the apple and father vowels exist in standard American and British but the distribution differs...)

This means that most native speakers can understand someone even if the vowels are all over the place.... which means that many second language learners overestimate how successful they are in producing the vowels of any particular variety....

have you actually heard him speak, Atch

Gumi, sorry dear, but if he thinks that 'rough' is pronounced 'raf'............... and 'fought' is 'fot'.

I hope you realize he used Polish transcription

Gumi those Polish sounds do not equate to the English. The 'a' sound in Polish Pan for example is identical the 'a' in a pan for cooking in English. But that is not the sound of 'ou' in rough or tough. That is the short 'u' sound in English. You can't render that sound using Polish spelling because the sound does not exist in Polish. That is a sound which as a speaker of Polish, one has to learn to produce correctly just as an English speaker has to learn 'cz' and 'ci' and clearly Nottie hasn't learned it.

appart from the part that it was transcryption it was also probably approximation on part of NoToForeigners - how do you know how he actually speaks those words in real life

Because if he could hear and thus say the sounds accurately, he would have known better than to try to transcribe them into Polish equivalents which do not exist. Simples - as Notty himself would say.

But it is not, Ms Atch! The English sound is considerably "wider", so to speak, and also stronger which means the lips of the speaker are opened with considerably greater force than when pronouncing the a in Polish "Pan".


That has reminded me of Reverened S. of the Anglican Church who once spent the full five minutes reproducing the sound 'a' in 'ration' for me. This was because he heard the sound of the short 'u' in the phrase I had uttered which phrase meant for him "Russian cards" rather than "ration cards". Reverened S. must have been in exceptionally good mood on that day since it was generally very difficult for me to elicit any answers to my ever-lasting calls to Englishmen for correcting my mistakes in spoken English. True, Reverened S. who was repeating 'ration' several times for me in front of other people (we all happened to be guests for more than one month in his house) made me feel quite embarassed with that, but since he delivered his sermons in such excellent and perfect English every Sunday, I simply had to forgive him his sin.

Perhaps to Polish ears :) which all goes to prove my point (thank you Ziem dear for your assistance in this matter) that there is difficulty for native speakers of one language in accurately determining certain sounds in others.

Oh but all jokes aside, remember I'm hearing and producing the English sounds from an Irish point of view and we speak with far less force. I had an interesting chat once with an Irish student of drama who was studying in the UK and she said that her vocal coach told her that the Irish don't project outwards in the way English people do, but they tend to swallow and soften the sounds.

Precisely that. And you cannot be too sure of yourself, even if you think you speak the foreign language perfectly. I remember a Russian lady telling me once she failed some exam for an EU Polish-English interpreter because one of her mistakes was using the form "dzieci poszli".

Phonetics was once my great hobby and English phonetics in particular. Others in the field were German and French (I didn't start to learn any language without getting to grips with its phonetics first). And if you went through all of them, you may say you know something about the phonetics of the European "vowel" languages. But Polish being a "consonant" language is a completely different story.

Numerous, in fact all, Polish students of English whom I've taught over the years never seem to grasp the idea of "long" vs. "short" vowels! Although Spanish speakers as well have similar struggles in English, Poles seem to be able to reproduce the distinct sounds in writing, yet curiously, not in speaking.

Curious, isn't it?