Do expats living in Poland speak Polish?

How can you hate a country?


Agreed 100%


I wish you well in Lodz i truly do and if you have a lovely girl there i am chuffed for you as well.I would say to you go for it, but it doesn't alter the fact that i thought some of your comments were ridiculous

does anyone insist that you do so?


it was also Goethe who envisioned replacement of Polish by German and suggested the means to that measure - can find some links if you really insist

No, and they would get pretty short shrift if they did.

To the original poster, who wants to forget he's British, it's worth remembering that the bad things that happened back home, and the things you don't like, you may well find here.

Yeah, there's good and bad in all countries. I can't see what is possibly so terrible about the UK that would make someone want to cut all ties with it and deny their country of birth.

But hey, each to their own.

I concur! It's really not fun at all sitting in "silence". Every day I trek on the bus and tram to do my errands and take the boy to school and I feel left out. I'd like to eves drop on a funny story or understand what the old ladies always say when they're dotting on my little boy.

I don't expect to become fluent but I'd like to be able to move about with ease a lot better.

I learned the simple "thank you" and already I feel better. I'm starting slow but hoping to get into some polish classes in January and working on building my circle of friends that will help as well.

erican.

For those who don't speak PL at all, why is that? Is it because you don't need it, it's difficult to learn, you don't really care?

Personally I wouldn't stand living in a country and not speaking the language - I'd feel isolated, vulnerable and somewhat ignorant...

Other expats I have met in my short time here have said they don't need it. That they can get around just fine without it.

I disagree. I do not feel like I can get around at all without it. Hell, I didn't even know I was suppose to "HAIL" a bus from certain bus stops until it passed me up one to many times. I think it will improve my comfort here tremendously.

I agree. Living in a country where you don't speak the language is a bit like having one hand tied behind your back, or deliberately making yourself partially sighte.

Cut off from so many things.

I've met these types of expats in various countries I have lived and travelled in. Too arrogant to learn the local language and usually disdainful of the local populace, even if they don't want to admit. These guys were a dime a dozen in Japan, and unrepentant. Personally, I can't imagine not even trying to learn the language of a place you choose to live in - even in countries where everyone speaks English as a second language, there's still a layer of life one is not privy to speaking the local lingo.

I'm immensely proud of my non-Polish girlfriend for slogging along and working at learning Polish. She's starting to conjugate and decline in her sentences now and I get a huge kick out of it. We're working on stripping American cadence and pronunciation out of her Polish speech, but that'll be an ongoing project, I think. :)

Ha. My first post.

I am Flemish living in Poland but didnt master the language either yet, I can help myself in a store but that's about it, a fluent conversation is still a utopia, I have lived here for one year and 2 months now...

For everything you are saying Fuzzy about gross generalizations and mistruths etc, you then make grandiose assertions.

Polish language is useless outside of Poland.
It is not useless, it is not mandatory, but any European language can be useful in any other western country in the world. I have Latvian, Dutch, Czech, Polish, German, Austrian, Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Brittish, Italian, Turkish, Swedish and Irish friends here in Australia. Now granted that means at the moment i would never have had the chance to speak Portugese, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Danish, Flemish and a handful of other languages, but I would have had the chance to speak those other languages if I knew them. Mandatory.. No, but certainly not useless.

Your comments about people from rich economies etc is just rubbish you are throwing up for the sake of sounding as though you come from some sort of superior country.

Well I am Australian, so I probably qualify as being one of those people. We have low unemployment, a welfare system that takes cares of those that cannot, free medical, free education, housing assistance etc etc.

Salary wise I will not go into specifics, but I am a senior IT professional, so I do ok.

Why then with that would I want to learn Polish? Why if asked "what language would you want to learn most?" would I answer Polish?

Simply languages are learned for many reasons. Some may learn a language because it is close to their native tongue and as such think it will be easy. Some may want to learn a language because of how difficult it is. Others may have a partner who is from the country and want to make the effort. Perhaps people want to travel to a country and not come across as loud ignorant travelers from some other areas of the world.

Personally... I want to learn because the country intrigues me, because I want to travel through the countryside in the smaller villages/towns etc and think it would be difficult to get the full experience without a better than 'basic" knowledge of the language. I think it is difficult beyond belief. I am not a natural linguist and I find pronouncing a number of the sounds really difficult, but.. it is a challenge and maybe I will not ever speak it, but I would rather spend my evenings learning that then watching something on the idiot box or play world of warcraft or whatever the hell it is that most other people are doing at night.

Of course everyone who comes to Poland should learn some Polish. You can't expect to get by with English when talking to older people, but please... don't repeat my mistake of spending endless hours at home with studying grammar and learning words. So what that you can read Gazeta Wyborcza and chat in Polish on the net if you can't have a normal conversation.

Good advice, Derevon. They key is, don't worry about making mistakes. Be humble and embrace humility!

Still, it builds up your vocabulary and grammar thus speeding up your progress in listening and speaking when you arrive at the country whose language you learn.

English in this respect is by no means easier to master than Polish or any other language. When on arriving in the UK I found myself in a strictly English-speaking environment, I just couldn't uderstand a word from conversations at dinners and meetings to which my English friends took me. But then I was the best in English at school in Poland! Without any previous knowledge of English, however, I suppose I couldn't have made substantial progress in listening and speaking comprehension in a comparetively short time, though for the first three months of my stay, I just felt like being surrounded by a glass surface around me which allowed air and light through it, but stopped understandable sounds.

I felt exactly the same here in Poland. I found it took a little perseverance before suddenly fluency came.

A little work, a lot of listening to others, and total immersion, pays off.

I'm from England but recently lived and worked in Warsaw for 15 months. In my experience the majority of foreign people who live and work in Poland won't even try to learn Polish. Most ex-pats (English, Irish and Americans) I knew were business people and spoke mainly in English when in meetings, so didn't feel the need to make the effort. Personally I've been learning Polish for around 10 years and now have an intermediate level of speaking, reading and writing. I've only come across about 4 people who have become fluent in Polish in all the time I've been learning.

I decided that if I was to live in Poland then it would be extremely hypocritical not to make any attempt to communicate in Polish - after all, how many times do you hear English people say about foreigners in the UK "if people can't speak English then they shouldn't be in England"?

Whilst in Warsaw I made a conscious effort NOT to mix socially with native English speakers. Almost all of my work colleagues were Polish, as were most of my friends and my flatmate. It's such a difficult language but really the only way to get better is full immersion.

I'm back in England now but try to keep up the learning as I hope to return to Warsaw again next year - possibly for good. So if there are any Polish people/teachers in the Manchester area who would like to meet up for Polish chat, please feel free to contact me :)

I felt the same. I worked in Bradford and was both disgusted by the way some people live in Uk for 30 years and barely speak English, and humbled by the way some immigrants speak English so well.

So I was determined to become fluent.

Of course it isn't so simple as all that. Some people have absolutely no ear for languages, and some people pick them up quickly, almost without trying. But hard work generally pays off.

I can't even understand how anyone can live several years in a foreign country, and not even try to learn more than 10 words.

They are denying themselves a normal life.

I would say it is, because it's low degree of inflection. For example, if I learn the word "gra" (game) in Polish, and then somebody suddenly says "gier" I wouldn't have a clue what it means unless I learned the declensions at the same time. In English, generally one word has one function/meaning in a sentence, which makes it easier. I don't have to wonder if a verb is perfective or imperfective and whether it's in the present tense or the future.

I agree entirely - in my own situation, being able to communicate in Polish meant getting so much more out of the experience of living abroad than speaking only in English to native English speakers.

Polish is a more complex language compared to English. For example, the word for sky in Polish is also a derivative of the word for the color blue, but it also has a connotation of the religious meaning of heaven. Coincidently, the Polish word for heaven is the same as the Polish word for sky. One word expresses 3 concepts. Many words in Polish are like that. Fewer words but multiple meanings dependent on how they are used.

It's also more a language of context. Sometimes a bit of guesswork is needed with Polish as to what the speaker is saying.

Using Polish is a must to learn more effectively. When learning a language, one must be humble and be prepared to accept corrections and advice. There is no room for the overly proud learner.

Im currently learning Polish... and find it to be very difficult... my wife can speak English fluently, and something comes to mind that she once told me... She said "English is very easy to learn but difficult to master." Ive been reading through these posts and my eyebrows have perked up at alot of things said here...

I agree that Polish is very different in its sentence structures/conjugations than English... And I DO find that alot of times when I ask my wife what someone said in Polish (from an email or something) that she often says "Well I think he/she is saying such and such" It always strikes me as funny that shes doesnt know exactly what that person was trying to say...

This is foreign to me... I think this doesnt happen very often in English unless someone is speaking figuratively or something...

But to say that a language is "basic" when you dont speak it is just plain dumb... Have you ever looked through a Polish dictionary?! I can speak Spanish on a middle-school level, a basic level, but I would never say that Spanish is "basic" just because I can only use it in a basic way.

KLove,

I'd say those are some good observations.

Someone once said to me, a native Polish/fluent English speaker, "in order to speak English, you need to know "this" much in order to say "this" much (putting her hands shoulder width apart, and then moving them in just a little bit indicating the second "this") but to speak Polish, one needs to know "THIS" much in order to say "this" much," putting her hands at full wing span apart and then moving them to only about 8 inches apart to indicate the 2nd "this".

My experience was much the same. My first year learning Polish was mainly learning cases/structure, and after 1 year, I could barely say anything but I knew how to use cases rather well. By year 2, fluency started to build, but it's still, for me, a slow process even now, but at least faster than in the beginning.

Saying Polish is "basic" is tempting for many native English speakers. I understand how it can seem offensive to Poles, but at times, it's hard to resist saying it. Time after time, an English speaker studying Polish goes to the dictionary over and over finding a different English word being translated to the same word in Polish. Along with that, English is not only larger than Polish (sheer number of words), it's larger than any language by far which again gives one the impression that Polish simply isn't as sophisticated of a language as English.

What I like about Polish is the completely logical pronunciation. If you know the rules, you can read a word. It's also nice that if you hear a word, 99 times out of 100 you can write it down correctly.

Grammar is a different story, but we get our own back on the Poles by having articles which they cannot fathom at all. You can always tell a non-native English speaker/writer because they get the articles wrong or omit them altogether.

It works both ways. Polish speaker learning English would find "cherry" for both
Polish "wiśnia" and "czereśnia" as well as only one word "married" for "zamężna"
and "żonaty" (just off the top of my head).


I don't think that's true and you can't prove it (no one else has managed to prove it yet).
As a matter of a fact, the "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics" tells us that vocabulary
of every language is an open congeries and you can't really count words in a given language.

Polish language specialists estimate the number of words at about 200 thousand
(not counting phraseologisms, slang words and specialist jargon), which is similar
to English (The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries
for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words.)

askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/numberwords


I learnt English myself and have many friends (native Polish, Russian and French
speakers) who have a good command of this language. Not a single one of them
has ever desribed it as "sophisticated" :)

As a proud holder of the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (that's level C2)
I have to say that it was waaaay easier to get than the DELF B2 certificate in French
(theoretically two levels lower than CPE) that I managed to pass too.
In my opinion, both Polish and French are more sophisticated than English (but that's
only my personal feeling and scientifically such statement can not be proven).

It's not - it strikes me that English is absurdly easy to learn and even easier to get away with making hideous mistakes in, because even the natives are destroying the language quite badly.

I suspect the ease of English is the reason why it's becoming the lingua franca.

One of the reasons for sure (probably the most important one).

I think an important point to consider here is that Polish actually gets taught in Polish schools, so people often can speak a standard version of the languiage. In UK kids (and adults) make mistakes my Polish students wouldn't dream of... and nobody notices!


Exactly. The thing with English is that native speakers are often more used to hearing it used badly and so it isn't a problem. It's easy to use English with dodgy pronunciation and poor grammar (like the natives do). In Poland folk aren't so used to hearing L2 speakers, especially learners.

I remember jumping on a bus and asking for a bilet normalne... ("Słucham?")... bilit normalni... bylet normalne... only to be greeted with non-comprehension. It was only when i screamed "Jestem głupi cudzoziemniec i nie mowię po Polsku!" That it dawned on the driver that the two words i was trying to use (beginning with a B and an N... whilst rying to buy a bus ticket) must be 'bilet normalny'. Although how he understood it when i didn't use correct grammer ('jestem głupim cudzoziemcem'... is that better?) i don't know.

I agree 100%. But some people don't realize this. So they make it much more difficult than it is.