News / Are the Germans taking back Świnoujście? [22]

Ironside, although technically Poland was one of the countries in Europe NOT to be occupied by the Nazis, this by no means signifies that there weren't as many collaborators as there were resistance fighters!

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

The point is, that Kohlisms, much like supposed "Bushisms", reflect a degree of questionable usage in both languages:-)
Turkish-German?? The only such lapse with which I'm even vaguely familiar apropos this topic is the phrase "Ich habe fertig!" allegedly uttered by a well-known Italian soccer star playing against Germany during the World Cup in or around 1970-something.

The grammar's wrong, although clearly "foreign".

Not exactly analogous, but, anyway....

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

Thanks! Forgot about THAT faux pas as wellLOL

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

Believe too that your Helmut Kohl was known to have coined (or at least popularized) an especially questionable grammatical usage in German "Dieses unsere Vaterland..." (This our...), something mimicked to death by cabaret comics over the decades:-)

When last in Germany, a twenty-something year-old chap confronted me and asked why I bother speaking to him in German. After throwing a few verses of Christian Morgenstern at him, I then asked the astounded fellow whether he'd ever even heard of W.S Gilbert of the "dynamic duo" of Gilbert & Sullivan. After much hemming and hawing he confessed he hadn't.

So much for his EnglishLOL

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

The same may be said for English:-)

Nice message, JanMovie!

News / Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa [102]

Not amongst the mainstream population, McDouche! However there always crops up some adjit-prop fringe group which asserts its insane desire to re-annex fomer "Prussia" with the present German republicLOL

Life / Polish people are the most ignorant people in the world! [331]

The thread, I believe, consists in establishing that Polish people are the most "ignorant", i.e. LEAST educated, and not the stupidest:-) You're quite right, of course. Having attended and even graduated university hardly means one has more smarts than someone who hasn't!

News / Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa [102]

After the fall of the Wall, pan-German identity became more important than at practically any time since the end of WWII, McDouche, you don't know what you're talking about! Placards everywhere I turned, "Wir sind ein Volk!" (We are one nation!, Jesteśmy jednym narodem!) and "Die Mauer ist weg, jetzt muss auch die Mauer im Kopf weg!" (Now that the Wall's gone, the mental barrier between us must go too!) etc.

Nowadays I'll grant you there's been an inordinate degree of multi-culti rhetoric throughout much of Central Europe. Nonetheless, the idea of German and Poland uniting remains sheer poppycock:-)

News / Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa [102]

Yout hear about Germanic identiity all the time! Guess you and I don't move in the same circles:-)

Love / Best, safe Polish dating sites? [95]

Yo man, they made the choice to date a Pole. Nobody made it for them, so now they're stuck with it:-)

News / Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa [102]

Jolu, if you mean that each of the nine or ten or so Slavic countries EACH has its own distinct identity within the Pan-Slavic orbit (world), you're quite right. Yet, as with the nine or ten or so individual Slavic languages, EACH has it's own uniqueness while at the same time sharing certain traits in common, e.g. consonantal palatalization more so than in Romance or Germanic languages, a system of verbal aspects which function differently from tenses in, say, French, English or German, for instance, moving on to the lack of definite/indefinite articles (except for Bulgarian noun clitics) etc...

The above of distinctly "Slavic", though a Pole is not the same as a Czech or a Croat. However, among other things, the Cyrillic alphabet has served as a sort of adhesive which binds the Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Bulgarians together and establishes their "specialness" as separate from those languages which use exclusively the Latin alphabet.

Wouldn't you therefore agree, that there definitely IS something called "Slavic identity" as their is German(-ic) or Latin/Romance identity?

I tricky proposal, I grant you.

Love / Best, safe Polish dating sites? [95]

Although I've no experience whatsoever with such sites, I could only imagine that it'd behoove someone trying to date a Polish female to at least try and "charm" her by learning a modicum of her mother language, if only to show interest:-) Relying exclusively on English might prove a tactical mistake!

Life / Polish people are the most ignorant people in the world! [331]

Poles whom I've met over the years tend to have quite a high level of university education, I should say. "Ignorant"?
Scarcely!

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

The Other, you're absolutely right. Obviously, both of us know German as well as anybody. This is not the issue.

@Wulkan,
Partially it can be used humorously, but my examples further demonstrate that word play within language leads to almost infinite possibilties. Only you, a native speaker of Polish, could pick up the subtle humor of certain cabaret routines. SImilarly, in German, I can detect subtle shifts of register through seemingly "wrong" grammar, because it's basically my mother tongue:-)

Incidentally, permit me to own up to a (not so minor) orthographical typo in a post from yesterday apropos tongue twisters, Zungenbrecher, łamie językowe:

"Cesio czeSZY się czeSZać się." LOL
Proszę mi wybaczyć:-)

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

Wulkan et al.

"Just don't learn Polish." = Nie uczy się (języka) polskiego., could be translated both ways into German, as stated in my previous post, the ONLY difference being that one is grammatically acceptable, while the other could mean either one of TWO things; either the other person(s) shouldn't even bother to learn the Polish language, or Polish is a language with which one may do many things, only (for pity's sake) don't bother to learn it. A subtle, yet important distinction.

Other several examples: "Ich spreche nicht Englisch." vs. "Ich spreche kein Englisch." = Nie mówię po angielsku. (In Polish, only one known way to state the identical idea). The first sentence means "I don't/can't SPEAK English. (..though - perhaps - I'm able to WRITE it!), whereas the second means "I don't speak English.", the understanding being that spoken communication in the German language is something of which I have zero competence.

See the distinction? While I never pretend to be a bilingual native speaker of Polish (and doubtless never will!), I grew up with both German as well as English at home, consider myself as "bilingual" in both languages as practically any European in English and their native language!

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

Whereas, though off topic, one COULD say the latter, it might mean something else. Am I exhorting the class "Don't (even bother to) LEARN Polish!" or perhaps, "Don't even bother to learn POLISH!" In your sentence ( speaking as a bilingual native), the meaning is more the latter than the former:-) Possibly too, what I really meant was the former, not the latter.

As with English, Polish or any language, on certain occasions the "right" can look "wrong", depending solely on the context.

JanMovie, "brzmi" might even be translated as "summt", as we are in fact speaking about only a small insect:-) In English, we could also say, In______________, the beetle "buzzes" in the reed.

Tongue twisters are no less formidable in our common language: "Fischers Fritze fischt frische Fische".
In Polish: "Cesio ciesie się cieszać się." ?? = Cesio kaemmt sich gern die Haare. = Cesio likes to comb his hair.
etc..

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

JanMovie, I'm an instructor of German and most of my students interestingly enough find German EASIER than either French or Spanish!! Others start tearing their hair out when the lesson moves to declensions. I always warn them though, "Lernt ihr bloss Polnisch nicht!" (Just don't learn Polish!)

:-)

Wulkan,

There were after all cross-continental migrations. Kartvelian speakers doubtless merged with Celts and Iberians...

History / Differences between Poland and Russia [43]

I most assuredly did, thank you Pamela! Frankly, I prefer Zima to Stolichnaya, but that's purely personal:-)

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

Oooops, false analogy. Polish has indeed no "linguistic" affinity with Japanese, while Georgian has been found to have said structural relationships with Basque, therefore your last statement is misleading:-)

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

Kartvelian languages bear a certain similarity to Basque. Though I suppose that's little consolation to those learning or attempting to learn PolishLOL

History / Differences between Poland and Russia [43]

Simple. Polish wódka's nearly 100 proof, Russian is barely 80LOL
Well, their both big lushes. That though's more of an immediate similarity than any real difference.

History / Do Polish people in general dislike Russia or Germany more? [369]

I'm also familiar with Fest's work, but in this regard would tend to disagree. His historical expertise however, along with his life experience, vastly exceeds my own.

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

To be sure, it's a moot point by this stage:-)

Genealogy / Bernatowicz surname? (I am starting to wonder if anyone in my family was American?) [85]

As do many Scandinavians, even prior to the Vasa dynasty:-)

Genealogy / Bernatowicz surname? (I am starting to wonder if anyone in my family was American?) [85]

Again, while it's most likely Polish, it could well have been morphed from some other related tongue! Names do get garbled, you know.

Genealogy / Bernatowicz surname? (I am starting to wonder if anyone in my family was American?) [85]

At this point, I definitely wouldn't rule out the option.

Genealogy / Bernatowicz surname? (I am starting to wonder if anyone in my family was American?) [85]

Quite so. What with borders changing hands (both during war as well as peace time!) every so often, the Slavo-Germanic mixture is scarcely surprising. This includes also Jewish populations who naturally adopted the place names of the villages/shtettls in which they were living:-)

The other half might well be Czech, even Rumanian, i.e. Banat-Schwaebisch:-)

Genealogy / Bernatowicz surname? (I am starting to wonder if anyone in my family was American?) [85]

The cross-pollination over the centuries between Polish and German, particularly as regards surnames, is insane! Half of German "-wicz" family names are of Polish proper or even of Polish-Jewish origins. Polish last names such as Sztarernberg or similar spellings are almost always German, sometimes also Jewish:-)

Life / Do you think that Polish people are rude? [951]

Amen, dude!

If people think Polish folks can get sarky and you have little to any experience with Germans or particularly Russians, brother, you ain't seen NOTHIN' yet:-)

Life / Do you think that Polish people are rude? [951]

It wasn't you, it was the insensitively provocative nature of your initial post which has prompted some tart responses!