Food / Polish Potato Varieties [28]


Are not really potatoes. I'm from the Southern US so I love sweet potatoes (called batat, pl bataty).They are often (not always) available in Biedronka.


also not much in the way of baked potatoes.... blame communism - ovens available in the PRL were not great and many people avoided using them as much as possible so there was a concentration on cooking on top of the stove (and some people didn't have ovens....).

my favorite potatoes in Poland are hard to find now... not too big, sort of flattened and yellow inside with a rich buttery taste... if I lived closer to a rynek I might be able to find them but no stores carry them....

News / How will Poland be affected by WW3 which has now started [559]


If you prefer I can go back to calling it by it's true name..... Faggot Land.... under the faggoty rule of putain the Faggot King.....

your choice

Food / Poland-Tea or coffee land? [165]


Is this in Europe?

During my recent vacations I've noticed that more and more kitchen staff in hotels is from Asia (some south asia but more southeast Asia - Filipinos especially).

In the US most restaurant kitchens are staffed by Mexicans (no matter what they serve).

Food / Poland origin apples and rootstock [18]


Reneta (reinette) are kind of traditional and very underrated. I like softer apples and not the bright red little stones that supermarkets tend to sell...

Life / Grisly crimes in Poland [124]


I know there are psychos.... usually they make their presence known pretty early on. This is an extreme crime for a first offense (if it is... have their been reports that he 'known to the police' as they say?)

That's why I thought drugs might be involved...


Some people just don't want to know the truth....


Or fried.... quicker and cheaper and guarantee of no future offenses.....

News / Poland and Russia in military alliance - Is that even possible? At least temporary? [71]


But are decreasing as they are generally felt to increase sexism rather than decrease it.....

Different language communities have different priorities and react to the 'same' ideas differently.

Speakers of Romance languages feel that specifically female forms promote equality (as do some Polish speakers). English speakers mostly take the opposite view and think that non-gendered forms are preferable.

The main effect of "Poless" would be to give 'Pole' and 'Poles' a specificially masculine meaning they do not have.

News / Poland and Russia in military alliance - Is that even possible? At least temporary? [71]


I can't remember the last time I heard 'poetess' used unironically.

Increasingly, 'actress' is only used in relation to awards like the Oscars and sentences like "she's a committed actor" are commonplace.

Waitress and waiter are largely supplanted by 'server' in the US (I think) and now 'waitress' has class connotations (lower working class).

It's weird to want to restrict the meaning of Pole to men at a time when sex marking is generally becoming less used in English....

unrelated (and a question for Atch): Trying to find usages of Poless on the internet, one site claims 'poless' is Dublin slang for 'police'....

Genealogy / What are common Polish character traits? [425]


You can live for years in the US without hearing authentic British usage.... not so many people on the ground, not very many British productions....

I have claimed (and stand by) the idea that there is a subset of American English that Americans think reflect British English (Stewie from Family Guy is a very good example).

IINM British actors in the US even affect it at times.

A very, very large majority of Americans have no idea how British people actually speak.... I know more about British usage than about 95% (conservatively speaking) Americans and some of it is still opaque to me.

News / Poland and Russia in military alliance - Is that even possible? At least temporary? [71]


The 'apostrophe s' works a bit like a genitive

The lion's mane.

My brother's house.

On the other hand it occurs at the boundary of the noun phrase and not on the head

"The King of England's throne" and not "*The King's of England throne"

But what does genitive have to do with the very unlovely coinage 'Poless'?

It adds unneeded and unwelcome specifically male meaning to 'Pole' (very much gender neutral already)

I'm not crazy about the Panie i Panowie tha'ts been creeping up lately (when Polish already had the far superior word Państwo)

In general I don't like creeping English lexicalization in Polish.... I really hate 'szczęśliwego nowego roku' (a real mouthful) instead of the simple and elegant 'do siego roku'.

On the other hand "Polki i Polacy" is possibly from German....

News / Scandals, conflicts, tensions, arguments - real life examples from Poland [543]


She clearly has emotional stability problems... I forget the details but she's done some crazy shyt in the past.... walk off the lot.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


Many who listen to him are not native speakers either and might get lost.....

Aim your delivery to your audience!

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


That's why I think Trzaskowski should slow down a little... he sounds a little too glib at present (maybe what you mean by 'too American').

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


Not necessarily.... when I hear a fast talker I'm wondering what they're trying to get past me....

Life / Grisly crimes in Poland [124]


You theorized that the murderer of a young Belarusian woman was a migrant.... he wasn't. You were wrong and now you're having a tantrum about it.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


You think too much about 'mistakes' you need to think about some other things....

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


He heavily aspirates the t, which Poles tend to hear as Polish c. I remember a Polish person asking me why a certain American always said cak instead of tak....

Life / Grisly crimes in Poland [124]


You're sick. You need help. You think you can read other people's minds. You can't.

Therapy now, that's what you need.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


He says "a politician now largely forgott--en but....

There's a hesitation or break or short pause between the two final syllables.... not a mistake in any meaningful sense

Even if he had said 'forgot' most people (including highly educated native speakers) wouldn't hear it as a mistake....

One of the dirtly little secrets of English is that endings are just not that important and native speakers (even highly educated ones) use divergent endings frequently, especially when it comes to past participles.

Added: different language communities have different approaches to their languages.... Poles are highly concerned about speaking correct standard Polish. English speakers generally don't care about 'correct' usage to the same extent. They're not completely indifferent but it's not as much a concern as it is for Polish speakers.

One reason is that first language education in English speaking countries, if it exists at all, is mostly terrible.... a bunch of myths and discredited ideas and many/most people end up hating English class and ideas like 'grammar' or 'correct'.

There are informal standards that can be very important but correctness for the sake of correctness...... not really a concern.

Life / Grisly crimes in Poland [124]


He meant that if you go to his facebook page (or instagram for you young'uns) you'll see he's phenotypically Polish.

Life / Grisly crimes in Poland [124]


Polish media can't report it legally but it's easy enough to find.... (took me less than a minute, along with fb and ig pages)

I suspect drugs played a role though I'm not sure what drugs can unleash such violence...

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


What's good for an examination is not necessarily optimal in other contexts.

He speaks a bit too quickly and important details can get lost or aren't emphasized enough.

at 2.12 (more or less)

"our border with Ukraine is completely open to their produce, which is not checked, sometimes it's even contaminated, so that...."

It would be far more effective with some pauses

"our border with Ukraine is completely open to their produce --- which is not checked ----- sometimes it's even contaminated ---- so that...."

and he's following Polish stress patterns without good use of contrastive stress ('contaminated' needed more stress along with pause so that the information can sink in).

Sikorski is much better at contrastive stress (very important for native speakers but mostly left out of textbooks....).

Again, he's very good but speed is not the be all and end all of fluency (or effective language use in the real world).

I'm always telling students to slow down, a more deliberate pace, and natural use of filler words, allows for the formulation and expression of more interesting ideas.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


It has different meanings in different sub-fields of language study.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluency

You're used to judging fluency in the context of a language classroom and/or oral exams where rapid speech with no fillers is valued. But that type of speech sounds awkward and off-putting outside of those contexts.

Sikorski's use of filler words is more or less naturally acquired from his long experience in English speaking intellectual environments. Words are measured and native and second language user alike will pause and (judiciously) use fillers while choosing words carefully.

or to quote from wiki again:

"Spoken language is typically characterized by seemingly non-fluent qualities (e.g., fragmentation, pauses, false starts, hesitation, repetition) because of 'task stress.' How orally fluent one is can therefore be understood in terms of perception, and whether these qualities of speech can be perceived as expected and natural (i.e., fluent) or unusual and problematic (i.e., non-fluent)"

Sikorski's seemingly non-fluent qualities are, in the opinions here of three different native speakers of three different varieties of English, very much in line with native norms.

Again, Trzaskowski's English is perfectly fine and he represents the country in English far better than say.... Duda but he doesn't sound like he's spent a lot of time in native environemnts (no reason he should). I might advise him to slow down a bit because at times he verges on the glib.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


You're a language teacher who bought the old line that they're a sign of disfluency. All speakers in all languages use filler words and removing them from speech makes a person sound unnatural.

Overuse is very annoying and some learners do overuse them but I'm sure if someone recorded you speaking Polish naturally they'd hear lots of filler words.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


That's a language teacher definition but again, Trzaskowski sounds like a really good student but his avoidance of normal filler words makes it sound a bit artificial.

And he's doing a fluff piece interview, so speaking fast isn't a big problem.

In talking about important topics where every word is important (Sikorski's element, he's at the UN after all) it's normal to speak a bit more slowly, weighing words, and to not be shy about filler words. You want the audience to understand and have time for details to soak in.

Again both men represent the country very well in English but I prefer to listen to Sikorski in English (if I had to choose).

What about their Polish? Which do you prefer to listen to?

I remember always enjoying listening to Dariusz Rosati. Leaving aside issues of policy he had great diction and was eloquent, a very good public speaker.

Marek Borowski also had a certain eloquence but could put out a lot of confusing word salad too... I remember having to translate something with a quote from him in it. It was (barely) understandable in Polish* but resisted being translated with all its might....

*I consulted a couple of highly qualified Polish translators and a Pole with a PhD (in a non-language field) and they all had trouble understanding it.

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


russian 9and Ukrainian) transliteration/transcription into the Latin alphabet is a mess... the official systems seem to be English based and ends up being incredibly ugly. I would prefer a fused IOS system based on Czech with haceks (maybe reversed for Щ ) and for Я , I would use ja (like Polish, Czech) at the beginning of a word or after a vowel and â after a vowel.... (similar process for Ю

ja govorû looks much nicer, I think, than ya govoryu or ja govorju or â govorû

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


Not a possible Polish name... ky is Czech not Polish which only allows ki, so Sikorski


How were Brits in 1981 to know that Sikorski is a pretty common name, not like Nowak or Kaczmarek or Kowalski but not remotely rare or distinctive....

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


British and Polish interests harmonize more often than not... unlike Polish and russian interests which are always in conflict....


Triple! Polish, British and American! (remember wifey)

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


Yay British intelligence! Cultivating behind the Iron Curtain! Pretty stupid of the communists to let that happen (and good for Poland).

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]


Sounds a bit like Skull and Bones at Yale...

Life / Poles speaking English - examples [263]

...ooga booga? (I have no idea what that is...)