Problems Polish People Have with Learning English

Plus - it may be high time for Poland to remove the 'Polish letters' like ąćęłó etc. It would make everything much less complicated (not only for Polish learners but for Poles too; when you're abroad you cannot type the Polish characters unless you use a special app or have a Polish operation system installed).

I have no idea what grammatics is.

The three most common mistakes made by Polish students are:

1. Articles

2. Verb tenses and forms.

3. Vocabulary

The two most mispronounced words are photography and photographer.

æ as in cat. Poles tend to utter something between æ and ʌ (as in cut). Minimal pair exercises can help. Cat/Cut Bat/But Hat/Hut
ɜ: as in girl, work. This sounds stupid to Poles, so they try to avoid it. Unfortunately, it is a very high frequency sound.
θ as in thing. Poles find dental fricatives very tricky, and prefer to say fing. Then again, so do some BBC employees, so perhaps we are wasting our time.

ð the voiced version of the last one, as in this. Poles tend to say dis or viss.

/ɔ:/ is a perennial problem, law, bore, pour. as well as a tendency to vocalise /ŋ/ (darlink)

Inversion in questions too: (How lonk you arr een ze Polant?)...

In fact that example not only has inversion and over vocalisation of /ŋ/ but also the rhotic r, an /i/ instead of /I/ an avoided /ð/ and a transference of the consonantal change that Polish has with final d.

Plus a horror of phrasal verbs which tends to produce an over-formal register. Misplaced really since Polish verbs aren't that different.

You could only remove ó and ż. Ó = U and Ż = RZ. If you removed the other letters you'd have to completely restructure the language.

thank you so far for the responses. they are all very much appreciated, Scottie1113, photography and photographer? You mean they mix the words up or pronounce them incorrectly?

I think it's the accent/emphasis that's being wrongly applied in this words i.e. the Polish way which is different from the English way

Pronunciation:
I had problems with "the".
I have also gotten into trouble with pronunciation of "fork" and "beach".
;)

Removing Ó and Ż would also be not a good idea. The language would loose any logic.

Jeden lód - dwa lody; jeden lud - dwa ludy. There is no difference in the pronounciation of the basic forms (although in the past it was, ó evolved form a long o). But there is a difference in the declination.

Now the length of vowel pronounciation is not important in Polish, and it's why Poles have problems with this in foreign languages (not only English - e.g. German too). Like beach - b i t c h (I don't know why the forum censors this word - doesn't it have a neutral meaning of a female dog apart form the vulgar one?).


1. Many languages have their own letters added to the Latin alphabet and it's not a problem for them.
2. It's not easy to change people's habits.
3. Polish letters, unlike for example German ones, have such an advantage that they can be typed without any problems with a standard English-language keyboard. It's enough to set a proper keyboard layout in the OS (which can be still used for English without any changes).

A problem happens only when some programs map some key combinations like Alt + a letter to the app's functions. It's not often, programmers are usually aware of the fact that Alt is used to type some local letters, but it happens for example with some software added to Radeon GPU drivers and sometimes leads to strange problems.

A common problem in Windows XP is also accidental pressing the Ctrl+Shift combination, which in Polish version of the OS with the default settings caused the change of the layout to the "typewriter" one (in typewriters in Poland another keyboard layout was used - one based on the German QWERTZ - and Windows has a compatible keyboard layout for those learnt to write on a typewriter with a touch and type method).

Concerning the topic, it might be a good idea to look for language errors in my post.

Mmm. Pronunciation. What a science! I have worked with some brilliant phoneticists in the past at the University of Silesia and although I "learnt" the phonetic table I don't have anything to offer apart from modelling and exercising the importance of distinguishing between long and short vowel sounds, as in tree /ɪː/ and fish /ɪ / , and /u:/ as in boot and /ʊ/ as in bull, bird/ɜː/ and computer /ə/

, - same as the Italians with the cliched joke of "peace on you".......etc............
/θ/ too as in "through" or "thorough". Agree with Jon as to /ɔː/ horse not being existant in Polish so a toughie. Schwa ........

Must admit most of my learners have travelled and/or love film and have less pronunciation issues than in the sarf. Smurf?

OT, some CBs as New English File have good exercises for such, as has "Sounds English"/O'Connor/Fletcher -Longman.

Over use of Perfect tenses when adopted, at expense of simple tense narration or ING forms. Confusion of "Will" from MLT with "Going to". Past simple expressed as Present simple ( reluctance to make an effort to use narrative due to 3 pronunciations of regular -ed past form )

I am a strong believer in functional language and teaching registers. This is fun when my younger students answer a curt "No" when I offer them a glass of water.

Just babbling really at what comes to mind. No idea why I posted, just interested in what people are saying. After 22 years I'm just learning to teach so that GB Shaw can rest in peace.

What would you replace them with?

This was pointed out already, but English has a lot more "vowel sounds" and diphthongs than Polish. This is why some Polish people mispronounce some words. Then again, I noticed some foreigners mispronounce sz and ś or cz and ć in Polish. The comment regarding "ąęćłó"... if you use regular letters "aeclo", you would still be understood (in an email for example). Polish doesn't have a rule like German where letters with an umlaut can be written by appending an "e" to the regular letter (for example, German ü can be spelled ue if the umlaut cannot be written).

Maybe Poles should try to speak English with a Canadian/American pronunciation... words might be easier to pronounce than the standard British pronunciation. The "r" sound is more noticeable in Canadian/American English for example.

Sorry, but some of the comments here about Polish seem like sour grapes... of course, parts of Polish are difficult (grammar and correct spelling can be difficult even for Polish people). However, looking at only Polish wouldn't be fair, would it? If you want to "re-engineer" Polish, we should start looking at English too. I mean the irregular spelling in so many words just doesn't make a lot of sense. Phonetic spelling would be much easier, right?

Well, I don't want to pick on English only. When we look at French, there are too many silent letters. Czech has too many accents (hmmm... I wonder if this makes Czechs more detail-oriented overall). Spanish makes it difficult to use the right "to be" word (is it "ser" or is it "estar"?). German has too many long words, because it combines words, and the word order is something to get your head around. Hungarian and Finnish have too many cases -- up to 18 cases in Hungarian and up to 15 in Finnish according to what I read online. Cantonese Chinese has too many tones, characters, and number qualifiers. And the list goes on... Do you get my point?

@polandsteve

Here are my observations (on how Polish people could avoid some mistakes in English) -- I am looking at this purely from practical point of view (I realize some people might disagree with me):

1. Poles sometimes omit articles such as "a, an, or the" in English, because articles don't exist in Polish. In English, you need articles to mark nouns (this is a simplification, but this is how I see it). In Polish, nouns don't need to be marked with articles because they change endings depending on the case/number, etc. so you know if a noun is a noun. In English, depending on the context, the word "order," for example can be a verb or a noun without changes in the actual word (eg. "I want to order something." but "The order is wrong."). This might be useful to point out to Polish learners of English.

2. The plural in English shouldn't be an issue for Poles. In Polish, plural nouns are a lot more complex than English, but they do exist.

3. I would say some English verbs can be difficult for Polish people to use correctly. When I was learning English, I found the usage of the verb "get" difficult to grasp because different verbs exist in Polish for "get." "Get" can imply movement (e.g. get over here) or receipt of something (e.g. get a book) or something else.

4. As far as pronunciation goes, I think some Polish people try to find equivalents in Polish letters/sounds when they see English words (everyone does that when they are learning a foreign language I think). Sometimes this approach should be avoided.

In the "cat" example, if you want someone Polish to pronounce it more closely to English pronunciation, tell him to read the word as "kiat" in Polish, and not "kat" (it's not exact). The "sh" and "ch" sounds in English sound closer to ś and ć than they do to sz and cz in Polish. So the word "chat" would be closer to correct pronunciation if a Polish person said "ć-iat" rather than "czat" in Polish. Poles can pronounce "ing" in "going" too much like "goink" -- it might be better to tell them to drop the "g" or de-emphasize it. I don't know what to suggest for the "th" sound as in "the"... I always thought that saying "the" closer to "d" sounds better than saying it with the "z" sound if the "the" cannot be pronounced correctly.

That's all I can think of....

thank you for all the answers so far, and thank you 123tn for your top five. i am interviewing a Polish student for my course later. I will take some of these answers with me for reference ;)

Merged: Polish writing 'to' and 'do' mix up?

Hello, one of my Polish students has a problem with writing the words 'to' and 'do' and getting them mixed up when writing English, has anyone else experienced this?

Poles frequently have difficulty with natural syllabic stress of an English sentence.

"I want to go upstairs.", for instance, often sounds like "Aj uuont tu gao UPst'rs." etc.

The whole problem is that it isn't natural, it's language specific (and differs in some details in various national varieties) and there's no curriculum for sentence intonation.

To maintain the myth of English as simply (and neutral and international) most of the difficult stuff is simply omitted in high school and so students get four to six years of practice fossilizing their pronunciation so that fixing it later is all but impossible.

I'm sure that those learners of Polish also have the same problem. As Mafketis says


A lot depends on if Polish learners have had much contact with English speakers.
Most Poles learning English at school will have been taught by someone Polish, and although what they have been taught will hopefully be grammatically correct, they are learning English from someone with an accent, who maybe has not had much contact with English speakers themselves.

While in Poland, learn English with the BBC. I did and I have no problem with reading the PolishForums now.

I wonder how many Poles would have learnt with the BBC as you did though? Did you learn English at school prior to that?
What I was replying to though was Lyzko's post where he was stating that Poles have difficulty with natural syllabic stress of an English sentence. That has no bearing on the fact that you don't have a problem reading PF.

As you learned from the BBC though,it might mean that your pronunciation of English is better than that of the average Pole if that is the only source you learned from.

I've noticed that many Polish people apply Polish rules of stressing the penultimate syllable in a word sometimes rendering an English word almost unintelligible other than by its context within the sentence. Recently someone I know used the word 'commit' but pronounced it as 'comet' as in Haley's Comet. It really took me a moment to process what she was saying.


Yes that's a problem. I know of a teacher of English at the University of Warsaw who taught her students to say the musical instrument 'cello' as 'sello', probably not recognising its Italian origins and associating it with the word 'cell'.

I think so. Most trainee teachers in a specific language here, are encouraged to spend some time in the country of the language they are learning, as obviously there is no substitute for spending an extended length of time amongst native speakers.

Those learning to teach English in Poland, might not have this chance due to the costs involved.

Oh yes, at one point my pronounciation was nearly perfect. Back in my student times, when I talked on the phone from the home of an Englishman I was staying with, he was later told by his friends who phoned him that they thought the person speaking on the phone was English! That was only about two weeks after my arrival in London from Poland. It clearly means I must have come to the British capital with Received Pronounciation already on hand. And indeed I did as the BBC course on Polish TV I watched ("Slim John") was supplemented by the Warsaw University scholars with a part showing how to pronounce the English vowels and diphtongs correctly. Mobile graphic techniques were used to show the learner how the tongue moves inside the mouth to produce a particular English vowel or diphtong sound. And I was a rather keen learner in that TV course which later on resulted in almost every person in England being sincerely amazed that one was able to acquire RP to such an extend in living outside England or an English family.

I generally have a good ear for languages, but my feeling is that without proper theory and that "graphic support" on a TV screen I wouldn't have been able to get to all the nuances of RP just relyuing on my listening abilities. English is particularly difficult to learn as far as the proper pronounciation of vowels and diphtongs is concerned. Natural syllabic stress (NSS) is in my view the most difficult thing to achieve by a foreign learner of English. Basically you have to live totally immersed for some time in an English-speaking environment. I think I finally got to it only at the last month of my 5-month stay in England. Prior to that NSS seemed to me "weird" or "bizzare" and I had just been deeply "intimidated" to apply it to my English before I crossed that psychological barrier. This was also the first thing I lost when my continuous contact with the spoken language stopped. NSS is no longer present in my English and in addition to that my fluency has deteriorated significantly, but this I believe is quite normal when you don't use the spoken language on a daily basis.

I'm impressed! I have only met one Pole who spoke English with no discernible accent.


The only thing I will say, is that those English people who do speak with an RP accent, are usually those who come from monied backgrounds and attended public school. However as far as pronunciation goes, I'm sure you spoke very clearly indeed :)


It sounds like it was an excellent course, I didn't realise it was so in depth, but of course, a lot would also depend on the learner and their natural aptitude etc.


I would agree with that. Too often I hear Poles pronouncing English 'u' as 'a' for example. Mug is often pronounced as sounding like Mag. I'm sure I make the same sorts of mistakes in Polish though.


Yes, there is no substitute for spending time in a country and listening to English speakers every day. The parts of words which are stressed In English are different to those stressed in Polish.

I hope she was right, but years ago when I was learning how to pronounce ' szczęśliwa', my friend's daughter corrected me by saying I was stressing the 'sz' at the beginning of the word, when I should have been stressing the 'cz' instead.


They do say, if you don't use it you lose it, and unfortunately this is true :(
Your written English is very good though, so if you can write as well as you do, you might still be more fluent than you think!

Maybe you should come back to the UK for another extended holiday to catch up!

This is it. I made this mistake once, but in the opposite direction. Reverened J. repeated "ration cards" several times to me as he heard me saying "Russian cards". Reverened J. of the Scottish United Reformed Church delivered excellent sermons in Queen's language during the mass I attended every Sunday.


I would point out that the stress should be on "li" here. Both consonants sz and cz should be pronounced with the same force, in fact they tend to form one sound: "szcz".


Yes and in my previous post I think I perhaps confounded (I'm not a linguist) NSS with Natural English Intonation, so to speak (or are those the same, in fact?). Whereas I had few problems with the syllabic stress in a particular word, the very characteristic rythm and melody of different types of English sentences was a real challenge. Intonation of an English sentence may be very different from the intonation of a Polish sentence.

Absolutnie tak! My understanding is that whilst the sz and cz should be clearly audible as distinct sounds, neither should be stressed and in general the stress in Polish words seems to fall on the penultimate syllable. Mr Atch is very big on not running your sounds together. His two golden rules for the learner of Polish (poor me!) are pronounce every sound in the word and don't fudge your word endings. He's also very fussy about the difference between the si and sz sounds and the ci and cz which to be honest I really struggle to hear. I can hear the difference in the sounds in isolation but when they're in the middle of a word it's a different matter. Sometimes it's obvious but sometimes I just can't see the difference at all. Similarly he struggles with the vowel sounds in English and claims that he can't hear any difference between for example bug and bog, not that it bothers him in the least!

Don't sweat it. I still can't hear the difference (unless they're exaggerated in isolation) but the good news is you don't have to hear that difference to understand everything. If you can pronounce them differently enough most of the time then that's all that's required of a non-native learner.

Understand anything would be a start!

In addition to the obvious differences between Polish and English which I didn't even bother mentioning, I've found too that many Poles, even the younger and better-travelled ones, typically absorb the US-African-American "ghetto slang", often at the expense of learning standard English.

So many can chatter away like California surfer-dude caricatures, and yet write abysmal sentences and appear almost illiterate:-)

My experiences though are mostly confined to the teenage Poles on school break I've encountered near where we lived in New York as well as some whom I had the misfortune to have as students here while on vacation!

Thanks for that Ziemowit.
Usually I just listen to friends and hope that I pronounce words as closely to theirs as possible, but I know i will never sound like a native.


Have a look at this link, although you may well have read and understood similar articles. I suspect this might be easy for you, but may help others who want to understand intonation. It also links to British Council podcasts on intonation.

britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-english-learners-can-improve-intonation


I can hear the difference between them now, but it's taken a very long time.....:(

Poles also usually seem as though with a minimum of basic vocabulary, they can go a long way with it! I find too they will repeat a favorite word or expression and continue chattering away without varying their word choice.

Then again, this is probably any enthusiastic learner:-)

Polish, like many languages, has no schwa, nor does it voice final vowels as in "many" (menee), "pretty" (prittee) etc.., and so for this reason British English pronunciation is usually easier to acqure than American.

why do polish people get he and she mixed up