The BEST Guide to POLAND
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Posts by Lyzko  

Joined: 12 Jul 2013 / Male ♂
Last Post: 12 hrs ago
Threads: Total: 45 / Live: 31 / Archived: 14
Posts: Total: 9999 / Live: 5881 / Archived: 4118
From: New York, USA
Speaks Polish?: tak
Interests: podrozy, rozrywki, sport

Displayed posts: 5912 / page 114 of 198
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Lyzko   
9 Mar 2020
Life / Americanization of Poland - good or bad? [49]

Same in Greenpoint!
Was there nearly a year ago and apparently many if not most of those wonderful cafes and shops are now gone, little Polish left, except for Polonia Bookstore(:-
Lyzko   
9 Mar 2020
Life / Will Poland ever be multicultural like Sweden, Germany or France? [283]

The lure of cheap labor as I keep saying but to little avail. Sweden, Germany, and France
may well consider themselves proudly socialist, but they remain capitalist in terms of
keeping competitive with today's market!

This means allowing prices to stay low by having a less expensive work force:-)
Lyzko   
9 Mar 2020
Life / Americanization of Poland - good or bad? [49]

But conversely not much Polish except among the larger Polish-American communities
such as Chicago, Greenpoint, Bklyn. and others:-)
Lyzko   
8 Mar 2020
Life / Americanization of Poland - good or bad? [49]

Says you!
I know better in this case, based on what I hear from my students.
After all, they live there 24/7 and have no need to either impress of suck up to me. They're expressing their honest opinions, I presume.
Lyzko   
8 Mar 2020
Language / Verbal nouns and past-tense adjectives from imperfective & perfective verbs..when to use which aspect? [48]

@Paw, ForumUser,

I understand both your examples, yet I'm not entirely convinced. However, "Maluje mieszkanie." = I'm painting my apartment" only reveals imprecision in that the lack of an article in the sentence is vague and might mean "my", "an" or "the" apartment in question here. To me as a native English speaker, there's no misunderstanding nor even the slightest hesitation translating the sentence!

On the other hand, a language like German definitely has both Polish and English beat, so to speak, in terms of its directional as well as resultative aka perfective specificity.

Maluje mieszkanie = Ich male meine Wohung vs. Maluje sciane = Ich male die Wand AN, whereby the latter specifies the painting of a surface, not
simply an apartment/house in general, thereby requiring the prefixed verb "anmalen".

Polish too of course has numerous verbal prefixes:-)
Lyzko   
8 Mar 2020
Language / Short Polish<->English translations [1049]

Still looking for a solid rendering into English of the phrase "Dziadek przemowil do obrazu".
At least this is how I heard the expression recently.
Lyzko   
8 Mar 2020
Life / Americanization of Poland - good or bad? [49]

When any country becomes "-ized", the results will usually be less than favorable!

Poles are and always will be Polish, Germans German, the French French and so forth.
Motto here? Ya can't fit a square peg into a round hole.....it won't work:-)

Superficially of course, English, in the future most likely, American English, will be used exclusively in nearly every country in the customer service sector, bar none.

This doesn't mean though that a foreigner's knowledge of the whatever local lingo won't still be tremendously helpful, albeit no longer absolutely necessary for basic every day transactions.
Lyzko   
7 Mar 2020
Language / Verbal nouns and past-tense adjectives from imperfective & perfective verbs..when to use which aspect? [48]

As you've obviously noticed by now, Polish is much more grammatically precise than English, more exact as well in her lexic function, compare
for example English "to see"/"look" vs. Polish "widzic", "zobaczyc", "ogladac", "patrzyc", "spojrzec"...

I SAW a movie. = Ogladalem film.
I SAW my friend in front of his flat. = Widzialem mojejo przyjacielu przed swoim mieszkaniem.
I've already SEEN the menu. = Juz zobaczylem menu.
Hey, LOOK there! = Hej, patrz tu!
I briefly SAW him standing at the corner. = Spojrzylem go stajacy na rogu.

Certainly English has perhaps even a richer lexic of synonyms, my point being though that English is to an extent relatively more flexible
in her choice, whereas in Polish, "Widzialem film" might sound to a Polish native speaker as if somebody was able to use their eyes to

experience the film (as opposed to another part of the body). Obviously, a film is meant to be seen first and foremost. And it an English

speaker says/writes, "Ogladalem mojego przyjacielu....", a Pole might think that the person was in a movie in which they were moving
as though in a succession of images:-)
Lyzko   
7 Mar 2020
Language / Verbal nouns and past-tense adjectives from imperfective & perfective verbs..when to use which aspect? [48]

Interesting that you mention this since I teach ESL, at the moment, to a rather large group of Polish exchange students, who, though considered
advanced, often make correspondingly similar errors in English:-)

Temporarily thrown off by adjectival phrases such as "...polskomowiacy = [a, the] Polish speaking man, which is technically not a gerund and therefore
not at all germain to the current topic thread.
Lyzko   
5 Mar 2020
History / BARBAROUS / BARBARIC / BARBARIAN tribes in Poland [62]

Once again, if only to reiterate for those who might not get it, the advent of Christianity in the Holy Roman Empire didn't quite work out; the Germans are still pagans!
Lyzko   
5 Mar 2020
Language / Verbal nouns and past-tense adjectives from imperfective & perfective verbs..when to use which aspect? [48]

Verbal aspects are considered by students to be about the most difficult stage of learning Polish.
German and English don't measure the duration of action in such terms! Polish has tenses as well, only the concept of perfectivity vs. imperfectivity doesn't correspond to English directly.

For example, "I go to school" means that the action is a general state of repetitive or frequentative continuation. In Polish, various verb forms are often required to express such action, whereas in English, words may be added to the sentence to clarify same.

To put things more simply, Polish aspects calibrate how often an action is performed whereas English tenses quantify when the action occurred.
Lyzko   
4 Mar 2020
News / Why is Poland so hostile against Germany? Do they realize how their reparations rubbish damages relations? [510]

As Poland's closest and (second) richest neighbor, you should be more interested.

How do you define a "pure bred" German anyway? This confuses me as nobody to date, German or foreigner, has been able to give me a legit explanation!

Prior to Hitler, my family had been living in German lands since at least the end of the Middle Ages.

Does that make me a "pure bred" German?LOL

Trust you're familiar with that old saw: "Was er glaubt ist Einerlei, in der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei"
Lyzko   
2 Mar 2020
History / BARBAROUS / BARBARIC / BARBARIAN tribes in Poland [62]

Indeed.

The Teutonic Knights journeyed as far as former Livonia.
Sergei Eisenstein shows their cruelty in his epic "Alexander Nevsky" (1938) with Nikolai Cherkassov. Certain scenes though of babies being consigned to the flames of those being burned at the stake might though have been apocryphal.