Language /
Why is the Polish language so difficult? [320]
German is often a "challenge" for foreigners (including myself off and on, and I grew up practically bi-lingual!), not so, so much owing to its intricate morphology, i.e. inflections etc., but principally, its word order combined with often labyrinthine sentence length, especially in formal, academic language:-)
Polish has what has been termed, even by certain Poles, a "quirky" counting system, especially after the number "five". True enough. German on the other hand can confound many a non-native, learner as well as advanced user, by the mere placement of certain particle words.
Polish frequently reveals irregularities of conjugation in addition to an involved aspectual system which can be rough going at the start, e.g. the transition from a basic, ordinary verb such as "ciąć" (cut): tnę, tniesz, tnie etc..., not to mention the prefixed perfective forms too.
Another thing I've learned about Polish, compared with German for example, is that it's spelling often is based on the word stem, that is, on which letter the root ends. Knowing the"hard" as opposed to "soft" stems in a fair number of Slavic languages determines the spelling, even the gender, of a noun in certain cases. For all words though, this seems to be true.
