Off-Topic / What's your connection with Poland? Penpals. [574]

Though not necessarily if he'd learned his English through present-day US radio or TV, that's my point! Newscasters of today don't hold a candle to those of yore aka Collingwood, Severeid, Cronkite or Murrow!

:-)

Off-Topic / What's your connection with Poland? Penpals. [574]

Had Ziemowit learned through our ABC, his English wouldn't be nearly as good!
LOL

History / Whom do the people in Poland hate more: Germans or Russians? [869]

True, for many Germans from generations past, Poland was merely farm land, fodder for the German Reich, whose inhabitants were deemed expendable peasant field laborers, there but for the good graces of German nobility, to serve the German people, nothing more, nothing less.

Thankfully though, times have changed!

Off-Topic / What's your connection with Poland? Penpals. [574]

Thenewchapter,

Do yourself and your host country a big, big favor and LEARN POLISH, at least enough to get by or why not just visit the country as a plain old sightseer and then return to Thailand!

English isn't going to get you too far or win you many browny points in Poland:-)

Language / Polish Language Exchange Thread [144]

Hi again, Paweł aka Pablo!

Trust you've already received my e-mail. I don't presently have access to Skype and so would prefer e-mail, if that's still possible:-)

tarsape@gmail

Life / Life in Poland for Indians !!! [40]

Good for you, Ziddi!

It's tough going at first, but well worth it in the end:-)

Life / Life in Poland for Indians !!! [40]

Do you speak any Polish yet? Scarcely expect the Poles to understand Indlish or any one of the four hundred some odd languages from your country:-) I can barely keep track of them all myselfLOL

News / As a Time Capsule From The Holocaust Was Found In Zlocieniec, Poland [34]

Compare New York with Portland, Oregon, Istanbul to the wilds of Anatolia, Moscow or Ektkaterinenburg and Irkutsk etc...

News / As a Time Capsule From The Holocaust Was Found In Zlocieniec, Poland [34]

Apropos, jon, when I mentioned once to an acquaintance from Gdańsk that I knew a Polish woman from Przemyśl, the former quipped, "Oh, I thought you said she was from Poland!":-)

Guess provincial snobbery and the like cuts many ways.

Language / The "end piece" of a loaf of bread in Polish [80]

In English, "quite close by (to) Cracow" would probably be the best translation.
:-)

Language / In search of Mówimy po polsku audio files [6]

@johnstol,

Am a son of the 60's myself (.....come the next five years or so, soon to be IN my sixtiesLOL), but only wished to caution you as to the pretty crass changes in speech which have occurred since '66, in Polish as well:-))

Language / Polish Language Exchange Thread [144]

Hey, Rich!/ Cześć,Panie Ryszku!

I teach English as well, although not on Skype, not yet anyway:-)
Certainly be interested in exchanging thoughts on methodology, since I teach English, German, and have tutored Polish professionally on occasion, more US-born beginners, at this point.

Poles tend to learn other languages more phonetically than Anglo-American native speakers, I've found. As English is so chaotically UNphonetic, Americans at any rate seem to learn by reading, rather than by listening.

That's been my experience though.

Hope to hear from you, if and when you have a chance.
marekzgerson@yahoo

Language / In search of Mówimy po polsku audio files [6]

I never used that book, but I'm here in the States. To be frank, that's a fairly old textbook and the language has changed quite a bit since then.

Guess though for bread-and-butter basics, such as grammar, it'd be allright. Slang and colloquialisms however, might get you more of a good laugh than an earnest respone these days:-)

Not knocking the book in itself, only the 60's are a long ways away.

I'd try bookbox,com for almost any language. The plethora of on-line material for Polish also is rather staggering!

Off-Topic / What is funny about this picture? [31]

I am and I did and I stand by my post!

Off-Topic / What is funny about this picture? [31]

Obviously from their own fears:-)

News / Britain - problem for Poland and Poles? [117]

Well, for how long is it "staying", (...and finally, when is it leaving)?
LOL

D'you mean perhaps "It CAN BE FOUND in the title of THE article"?
You're translating again, old man:-)

News / Britain - problem for Poland and Poles? [117]

@rozumiemnic, I keep up with the news! 'Course the average Brit isn't going to trash their own country any more than the average American isn't going to admit to the fact that our nation is in a state of civil war and that things are going to hell in a handbasket!!

:-)

News / A better Polish solution: aiding refugees in their home region [29]

...but, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, "have we anything better"??

No:-)

News / A better Polish solution: aiding refugees in their home region [29]

Amen:-)

News / Britain - problem for Poland and Poles? [117]

Look with your eyes, man! When last across the pond, the IRA was the big ticket issue. Poles weren't really a problem, as I recall, more the Hindus, the Pakis and your occasional crackpot sounding off in Speaker's CornerLOL

News / Britain - problem for Poland and Poles? [117]

Post-Brexit Britain is an entirely different place than over a hundred years ago, when Joseph Conrad came to England and became one of the best prose writers in the English language:-)

Today, Britain has become a xenophobic jungle, probably worse than it was nearly twenty years ago when I was there last.

News / A better Polish solution: aiding refugees in their home region [29]

Makes sense to me. This would seem to eliminate the need for refugees to come to Poland etc. when they are being aided in their home country!

On the other hand, who's stopping ANY group of people from visiting or even making a sojourn abroad for either limited touristic or study purposes:-)

Love / Are Polish men handsome to you? [182]

Polish men tend on the whole to be tall in comparison, say, with Southern Italians, Greeks or certain Asians as well as Hispanics.

As a man, I can't honestly comment on whether I find them "handsome" or not, only that most are easily recognizable to me by their distinctive lozenge-shaped head and squarish facial bone structure along with light eyes and coarse, fair hair:-)

Polonia / Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]

Sure does:-)

Isn't it true though how the more complicated the language aka grammar, the more conservative and above all, homogeneous, the speakers, e.g. Polish, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Finnish etc? It's been theorized that ancient peoples who felt themselves especially threatened by surrounding hostile populations used the difficulty of their native tongue almost as a protective shield against perceived enemy forces around them. If their speech seemed impenetrable to outsiders, they could more easily protect themselves from harm.

Sorta make sense?

Polonia / Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]

Didn't you find that it was helpful knowing Swedish, Rustygun?

Polonia / Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]

To which country are you referring, Rusty? Sweden or Poland?
:-)

Polonia / Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]

Indeed, Polson!

Oddly enough, I once heard a youngish woman speaking to her American husband in English, and her accent reminded me uncannily of Ingrid Bergman.
I happened to address her in Swedish, quite by happenstance, and it turned out she was from Poznań:-)

Polonia / Let's talk about Sweden and other Scandinavian countries [236]

@Maf, Swedish is probably the most widely-spoken of the extant Scandinavian languages aka the most "practical":-) It's also spoken in much of urban Finland, and was at one time more popular then English, German or Russian.

Most Swedes up till round about sixty-five or over, speak (or at least THINK they speak) nearly fluent conversational English, often with even a slight American-style accent, compared, say, with the Danes, Germans or Dutch, who often sound rather British!

Swedes on the whole are critical of foreigners who speak their language, as relatively few non-Swedes actually have bothered to learn it, thus, are liable to be a bit on the corrective side concerning mistakes.

I too speak several Scandinavian languages, though find Swedish to be far and away the most melodic.

Genealogy / Why are some Polish people dark complected, and others very light [511]

...possibly intermingled with Laplanders, themselves known to be dark-haired and somewhat yellowish complected:-)

Language / Slavic languages words similarities with Polish [240]

Prekrasno = prekrasnoy in Russian, right?
:-)

Always found it intriguing how close the Russians words are for "red" and "beautiful".