Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


Often, even educated native speakers without a background in linguistics or language teaching have strange ideas about the connection between writing and speech.

Some years (well, centuries) ago there was a difference and it was similar to the one described (and still exists in Czech roughly). But the difference disappeared a long time ago in Polish. I don't know of any dialect of Polish that maintains the distinction. If these native speakers do (and can accurately perceive it in blind tests) then they should contact a linguist to write it up and get it published.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


To weed out those too stupid to learn? Like ....... YOU!!!!!

Fortunately I'm a lot smarter than you so cases weren't that hard to learn.

Language / Polish slang phrases - most popular. [606]


For starters:

Odczep się! (get away (from me))

Spierdalaj! (f*ck off!)

Spieprzaj! (the same, but maybe not as rough?)

To pluralize, just add cie

Odczepcie się!

Spierdalajcie!

Spieprzajcie!

Special bonus, if you want to sound presidential the next time some guy is hitting on you:

Spieprzaj dziadu! (very roughly: fuck off, loser; dziad is very hard to translate)

plural

Spieprzajcie dziady!

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


"Nie zrozumiałeś mnie" or maybe "Mnie nie zrozumiałeś" remember that nothing can come between nie and a following verb. The only way what you wrote makes sense would be to add to and get 'To nie mnie zrozumiałeś' "It wasn't me you understood (but rather someone else)"

I'm also not so sure about that 'jeszcze co?' I think that 'co jeszcze' is better.

You can make the case (get it? get it? hee hee) that in Polish the masculine gender is breaking up into two separate genders animate and inanimate with koń and mąż in the first (along with banan, papieros and some other inanimate nouns that are virtually always treated as animate) and most other masculine inanimate in the other. That's clearly where things are headed but the change is far from complete. (though you can defend the position that Polish has three morphological and four syntactic cases in the singular).

Also, gender is just one system of noun classes and many (though not all) linguists call the noun classes of Bantu languages 'genders' and most Bantu languages have a half a dozen or more (sometimes many more) genders than European languages.

Note here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#More_than_three_grammatical_genders

Life / Bilingual kids in Polish schools [30]


SAE : Standard American English, sometimes called General American English a pretty uniform and largely class neutral spoken standard. For formal versions listen to NPR or national news broadcasts. For informal versions listen to the lead characters in most American tv shows or movies. Largely indistinguishable from standard Canadian usage.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_American_English

AAVE : African American Vernacular English an ethnolect or sociolect mostly unique to the US.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAVE

Life / Bilingual kids in Polish schools [30]

US usage is far more uniform than the UK, regional differences exist but not to the same extent. The big difference in the US is between SAE and AAVE.

British speakers are more likely to understand American better than the reverse. I've known university educated Americans who didn't understand at least a third of the dialogue in Mike Leigh movies (Life is Sweet comes to mind).

Life / Bilingual kids in Polish schools [30]


I haven't thought of British English (as spoken by everyday Brits) and American as the same spoken language for quite some time. I think of them more like Swedish and Norwegian - autonomous standards that are mostly mutually intelligible, especially in face to face situations. If I eavesdrop on spontaneous British conversation I understand 50-90 % (never 100 %). Face to face, things go easier, but I realize I'm missing some discourse cues.

What's needed is an American standard that's differs more markedly from the written British standard.

Life / Bilingual kids in Polish schools [30]

And doesn't mind failing English in the process.

Life / Bilingual kids in Polish schools [30]

Generally, up to age four or five bilingual kids can have some delay and it can also take them time to figure out how to separate languages in different contexts, especially if both parents speak both languages. Conversely, his vocabulary might be patched together with holes here and there (things he can say in one language but not the other). These issues usually resolve themselves, but the effects can be long lasting. Some explicit tutoring by the parents to cover linguistic gaps might not be a bad idea. At this stage the priority should be Polish so the native Polish speaker should make sure to go through story books, picture books (with labels) and the like to make sure he knows what's what.

And ... are you sure it's the bilingual thing? Some kids just are less social and adept at mixing than others and it can take them longer to fit in with other kids. As a monolingual kid I was just kind of awkward and not very social and had some rough times in my early years of education. If I'd been bilingual I can imagine my problems being blamed on that.

Finally, as a general rule, make sure you keep any kids with home English out of English class at otherwise Polish schools. The teachers are liable to feel threatened by them. And, as Wroclaw mentioned, they mostly don't know about the kinds of things that English speaking parents say to their kids.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


Except .... it hasn't. The current Romanian case system doesn't really have anything to do with the old Latin case system. For nouns, it's a stripped down Balkan style system (with nominative-accusative and genetive-date mergers) expressed only on articles.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Oh pleae, you're an idiot and your English isn't .... very good. It's hard for me to imagine that a native speaker (who isn't drunk) would make the mistakes that you do. Please pay attention to my corrected form and maybe you'll learn something - or maybe not.

"You just contradicted all the other "Polish native speakers' who claim that rz is always pronounced like s in casualty or rz in morze.

No wonder that 98 % of Polish people have a medical certificate for 'disortografia', an illness unique in the world."

Once you learn English beyond the pidgin level, maybe I'll take your rantings seriously.... maybe.

Oh, and many native speakers of Polish aren't especially aware of the voicing assimilation that goes on in the language. The principle is very simple to learn however (unless you're dumb as a box of sand). Then again, native or very fluent speakers of English (a category you obviously don't belong to) are mostly unaware of voicing assimilation or stress placement rules in English either.

Overall, I suppose it's easier and more fun to make silly and inaccurate claims about Polish than admit the grim truth that you just don't have brains enough to learn it. Just not very bright, I suppose.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


It's pronounced like sz in chcesz, yes, that's a completely predictable rule, rz after p is always pronounced as sz (just as w is pronounced like v or f depending on it's position in the word and/or what sounds are around it. It's called voicing assimilation, a basic principle of spoken Polish. There is a not very large group of rules to learn and then you can tell the pronunciation of any Polish word by its written form. That is, if you have basic level of human intelligence. If you're a moron, you'll just notice that some sounds are pronounced differently sometimes and no amount of repeating the simple rules will suffice.

And the si in Kasia is a completely different sound to Poles as any Pole will tell you that Kasia and kasza sound different to them.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

I think it's more likely that lyzko simply was momentarily confused by a bad dictionary, the German definition probably includes an idiom that he took literally and transferred into English.

Even langauge professionals can get caught up in the trap between literal and figurative meanings (or between which idioms are transferable and which aren't). I've made my share of mistakes in that area (which there is no need to examine here).

Has little to do with the relative complexity of Polish and English.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


Is it Langenscheidt? IME The old Langenscheidt Polish-German dictionary is pretty bad (hint: think of the last syllable in British English). I think it may have been good once, but was not kept up to date. Many times I had the experience of looking a German word up and being puzzled by the Polish translation, and so off I would go to my Polish English dictionary and find out it's a synonym of a better known word.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


English is not 'fairly simplistic' in it's structure. But the greater reliance on word order and overall fewer inflections means that the structure can be pretty mangled but still understandable. Native speech and writing has a lot of structure that natives themselves don't recognize. But learners don't have to respect the structures that natives use to make themselves understood (especially to other learners).

This backfires badly on more advanced students who may be pretty fluent in day to day spoken English (they think) but cannot break the intonation barrier (a lot of the structure of spoken English depends on stress levels and choice of stressed word) or ever learn to write formally (without a native double checking) or do half a dozen other things that they might be able to learn if they had really had to work at it early on. The price of early ease is that hardly any learners ever really master the language.

For a lot of everyday uses, this doesn't matter, but it does lead to crap like the following passing for (academic!) English:

"The article aims at defining the notion of amateurism phenomenon. The basic forms of musical amateurism are also considered here. Amateurism appears in the article in its development, particularly, in its transition to professionalism. Characteristics examples of regeneration of amateurism into professionalism (jazz, rock, bard's song and other kinds of mass music) are given here. Special attention is being paid to such a form of modern amateurism as computer composing."

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


That's actually more likely to be : "We speak English, okay? Is more easy!"

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


I'm not Polish and have no Polish family background and didn't start learning Polish until I was an adult. I'm just smarter than you, I guess.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


Guess I'm a genius, then bitch! Pocałuj mnie w dupę, debilu.

Too bad you're too dumb to learn Polish and the only way you'll know what I just wrote is to ask someone who's smarter than you! Ale ja rządzę!

Language / Polish words difficult to translate into English [66]

Of course there is no one translation of 'loser', it's not any kind of basic semantic category like 'red' or 'good'. There are a number of ways to translate it depending on context.

Nieudacznik is good for a lot of the time, but other times frajer, dupek or something else might be appropriate. The range of uses of particular words in Polish stubbornly won't match up and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Don't blame linguists who perceive the value of creole languages, blame people like David Crystal and the "World Englishes" approach which I despise it for many reasons.

But then I'm actually against international use of English and the idea that everybody needs to learn it (which guarantees degraded standards). I'd much rather fewer people tried to learn it but those who did really respected it as a language and not a fashion accesory or job requirement.

Europe is actually almost entirely free of dystunctional language policies, which is one reason that there's more social mobility and generally high standards of living. The places that cling to colonial languages are the ones mired in perpetual poverty, not matter how many quaintly picturesque literary prizes a few authors manage to win.

Lastly, finding out that native speakers of a language you're learning speak differently (often radically so) than the contents of the courses or textbooks you've had is the normal state of affairs.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


I actually agree, I just that standards need to have some real organic local connection.

And Jamaican (or any creole) is more than slang or degraded. It just has different rules about verb agreement, tense and aspect. There's nothing to prevent people from using Jamaican grammar and speaking insightfully about politics or science except for bureaucratic tradition and pure prejudice.

Where you get the broken Engish is in ex-colonial societies with local languages that haven't been supplanted by English but where English is used in some public functions. That kind of English, spoken as an imperfectly acquired second language and only used at work or school can be pretty disheartening for native speakers. There are some very fluent speakers of English in those places, but it's not the norm.

Basically, in lots of socieites (most ex-colonies and some others) language policy is carefully chosen to minimize the possibility of social mobility.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]


The native language (as in everyday spoken language) of Jamaica is Jamaican Creole, which is no more 'broken English' than Polish is 'broken Russian'. Unfortunately, the local administrative language in Jamaica is called English which guarantees that most of the local population will have minimal chance at social advancement as that requires mastery of a foreign language (without the recognition that it in fact is a foreign language).

Jamaican Creole is a lively, interesting and expressive language suppressed in favor of a pariticularly lifeless and boring interpretation of British English which is perceived as being more in line with the ruling classes ambitions (roughly : keep the rest of the population in their places).

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Georgina, Do the rest of the world a favor and stay in your own country and don't inflict your ignorance on the rest of the world.

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

It might be if that's what people actually did. The 17 words for 'two' idea is based on formal prescriptive rules that almost no Polish speaker bothers following. In reality, most people drastically simplify the number system in various ways.

For years I didn't even try to inflect numbers (except for one, which is easy and two to a limited extent) beyond that I just used the nominative and ..... nobody every noticed.

This was partly an accidental strategy that came about after I noticed that most people couldn't answer questions I did have about number forms (or gave very different answers from each other).

Language / Anglos don't distinguish kasza from Kasia? [22]

I can usually say them okay but I don't hear the difference (except before i or y) or unless i'm concentrating really hard when someone is saying them together.

But the functional load of the difference in connected speech is small enough that you can learn to understand everything without hearing the difference.

Language / I would like to make a collection of beautiful and/or funny polish quotes [30]

The term in (American) English might be : 'make babies'

I think modifying it sounds better in English though:

Don't tell (your) dad where babies come from.


I should hope no one teaches him that!

(in colloquial English to 'do someone' means 'have sex with someone' (especially, but not only oral sex).

Aren't you glad you know that now?

Life / 3 reasons why you hate Poland. [1049]


Not especially true, once you know how to get things done.


Often, yes.


No. Contrary to common opinion the country's mentality hasn't changed much one way or the other during or after communism. It is what it is.


AFAICT Poles don't want western style smiley happy customer service. This hasn't bugged me in a loooonnnnggg time.


Polish raw ingredients are generally good quality, learn to cook what you want if you can't find it any other way.


It's not that hard at all if you actually speak and don't expect to understand everything at once. Comprehension is a gradual thing in any language.


Preach on brother!!!!!! The stupidest, vilest way of localizing films. The only way of translating movies that _always_ ruins the movie for native speakers of the original language (even when they know they know Polish too). If Poles want audio translations instead of subtitle they should learn to properly dub. I have nothing against dubbing (which would have made it much easier to learn Polish) but lektors are just ugly sounding.


Compared to what? Polish public transport might be grubby but it goes and works better than 99 % of public transport in the US (which mostly doesn't exist).


No real argument there.


Yes and no.


No need, we get the idea.

Language / Polish words difficult to translate into English [66]


kilkanaście?

zapytany (as a noun)?

There's a very big difference between 'having a translation' and having a translation that matches the original and isn't awkward or over wordy or have other baggage. My most frequent problem in translating (Polish to English) is English not having a word that will fit a particular context.

Language / Polish words difficult to translate into English [66]

Many countries have a 'favorite' expletive, usually with some kind of sexual meaning. It's what people say when they get upset and tends to be used often in ways where the literal meaning would make no sense.

For Americans, that word is 'fuck'. For Brits, I guess it's fuck too but I have the impression that it used to be 'bollocks' (a word most in the US are ignorant of).

In Spanish, it varies by country, chinga in Mexico (fuck), puta (whore) in Nicaragua and con~o (cunt) in Cuba and Spain are ones that I know about.

For Poland, that word is kurwa, which means 'whore' of course. But as the expletive of choice, it corresponds to American use of 'fuck' as a semantically empty way of cursing. It does not correspond to fuck in referring to sexual acts.

Shut the fuck up.
Zamknij się kurwa.

What the fuck are you doing?
Co ty kurwa robisz?

etc etc

Language / Polish slang phrases - most popular. [606]

Kumpel means 'friend' but is different from przyjaciel. It implies (as far as I can tell) long acquaintance and rapport, but not necessarily strong emotional attachment, or at least not as strong an attachment as 'przyjaciel'.

I think I've mainly heard it in the third person 'to mój kumpel' or maybe 'jesteśmy kumplami'. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use kumpel in the vocative (kumplu!). That just seems bizarre.