Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

As usual, I must qualify my feelings about this thread. If I were working for an international concern in Poland, for example IBM etc.. and I were hired as a software engineer using strictly ENGLISH with other American, British, native speaking colleagues, I'd have zero qualms about using English and probably not bother to learn all but bare minimum Polish to get by.

Other than that, if working with Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Russians etc.., I'd suppose I'd be forced by sheer necessity to use English, fully aware of the myriad pitfalls which would await me were I not careful to "inspect" all communiques, both spoken as well as written, for the perennial boobytraps:-)

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

The international language has always been numerals anyhow, so, just think back to those math conferences during the Cold War when the East Germans had their top man in front of the blackboard, the Poles theirs, and the Czechs theirs etc, none of them speaking the other's languageLOL. First guy comes up and puts his formula on the chalk slate. The next infuriated but not able to speak in German if, say, he's French... responds by feverishly putting his counter formula on the same chalk slate, working up a royal sweat in the process etc... This goes on for several hours at least, until each one is so exhausted that they can't continue. No "language", e.g. English, Esperanto etc. needed, only straight, pure math!!!!

:-)

Work / What is life like in Poland for a student? [26]

Correct, monitor! I found the people in Dortmund, for instance, particularly loudmouthed and brazen:-)

Work / What is life like in Poland for a student? [26]

As an American, pierogi, I can only concur with much of what you said. We are by in large superficial in our relationships, true, yet Europeans whom I've encountered (having lived there on and off for some time!) can frequently appear tactlessly abrupt, smug, arrogant in a different way from us Yanks, myopic and judgemental, often believing their way to be the only way - a path to which we poor Americans can only aspire, yet can never achieve:-)

Utopia cuts both ways, my friend. One man's superficiality is another's social lubrication. Perfection, like Utopia, is a chimera. It is pursued at one's own risk!

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

Wulkan, how are you measuring "management skills" and why do you contend India (singular in English!) lags far behind Germany, The States and Poland? On which criteria do you base your assertions?

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

local fella, curious as to your standards for judging the management skills of those from India. From which country do your hail, by the way?

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

It wasn't apparent to me at first, only that the person is clearly a foreigner.

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

Probably English is the "hardest" language in the sense of correlating phoneme/grapheme/pronunciation:-)

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

Absolutely on the money, Magdalena! I couldn't agree more.

English starts out easy and gets harder, Polish starts out hard and gets much easier.

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

Cute, smurf. Don't quite see your point with it though:-)

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

Same with any language, other than a fairly large speaker percentage such as German, French or Spanish.
Try attempting to speak Hungarian or Lithuanian without the accepted accent/grammar and folks'll look at you like you've got two headsLOL

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

True enough. Fortunately, that never happened to me. Just lucky I s'ppose!

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

That actually happened to me in Germany, but never in Poland. As I was going through customs in Berlin returning to the States when the customs official called me aside and damned near INSISTED that I speak the language of my (US!!!) passport because he didn't believe I was American:-) He had to satisfy his curiosity as to why a native-born Yank spoke German like a German.

Poles on the other hand, knew I was not Polish (yet never guessed where I was from). They spoke nothing but Polish with me, including those who knew English, and seemed to understand me about as easily as I seemed to understand them.

Because, McDouche, there's basically no standard for English in Poland, much as is the case unfortunately throughout the rest of the non-Anglo-Saxon world. Germans too often claim to speak excellent English, yet make such egregious errors as to make the shackles of one's hair stand on end!!

Language / Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn [226]

Indeed!

"Ja dziękuję w awansowanie" = I thank you in advance vs. "Dziękuję z góry." along with numerous similar English to Polish word-for-word translations??? They think it's Polish, but it AIN'T!!!!

Hysterical, no?

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

Pan Lech did just turn seventy, kidsLOL

Then again, he may either have been on his meds when he shoulda been off 'em, or off 'em when he shoulda been on 'em.

Or, he's just joking.

Anyhow, considering that most Polish territory was only distantly "German" and has long since been in Polish hands, (let alone consider for a moment Herr Hitler's desire for total annexation!!!) let's do chalk his comments up to plain ol' shock value and leave things at that, huh?

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

Guess my eye's just got glued together, bud:-)
To quote Einstein, putting your hand on a hot stove for even two seconds can seem like two hours, looking at a cute girl for two hours can seem like two minutes.

Length is as relative as history itself ^^

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

Historically correct, Crow old man! "Der Drang nach Osten" of course predates the last century by quite some time:-) One can indeed trace this Germanic thirst for border lands comprising present-day Russia back to around the period of the Livonian Knights, round about the early 11th or 12th centuries or thereabouts. In those days, the Teutonic Knights as they became known were greatly feared by the Slavs, much as the Germanic Vandals were feared by the Romans some thousand or so years earlier.

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

Those same hard-working Germans are interestingly enough the most "vacation-rich" nation on the continent, with more paid time off than almost anywhere else I can think of. "Hands off our holidays!" (Haende weg von Urlaubstagen) was one of the first things with which Ms./Dr. Merkel had to contend as newly appointed chancellor. Many at the time felt she was "Americanizing" Old Germany just a liiiitttttlllle too quickly and ought to follow suit with the more Socialist-friendly of her seasoned predecessors, such as Gert Schroeder and Kohl, for instance:-)

A United States of Germany and Poland???! Naah, it'd be a marriage of (in-)convenience made in HELL!!!!

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

The Drang was NO myth! As to who "invited" whom, this, as with ever so much supposed history, remains subject to debate. I've yet to see reliable sources for such (and I DON'T necessarily mean Wiki either)!!!

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

Watch the rants, Valisz! They're most unbecoming:-)

And while we're on the subject of "German" scientists (German-Jewish symbiosis notwithstandingLOL), there were plenty who were not only gentile, but fervidly anti-Nazi, witness: Max Planck, Walther Nernst, Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann (both of whom split the atom), Erwin Schroedinger (an Austrian, but "Germanic" nonetheless I guess), Klaus Fuchs (a Communist and later naturalized Brit!!!) etc..

As far as being a "crap hole", sounds like more filth coming out of your (com-)posts than anywhere in either Poland or Germany.

Always gave you Czechs credit for being a tad more enlightened. I see I was mistaken ^^

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

dantun22,

Personally I'd opt for learning Polish, at least at the beginning. While it is clearly incumbent upon your girl friend living in England to eventually learn the target language, knowing some basic Polish certainly can't hurt. Just so long as a bilingual household doesn't become a crutch for her siphoning benefits off of the state and remaining a perpetual dependent:-)

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Spot on, Lenka!

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Perhaps an English male hoping to meet and marry a girl in Poland ought to speak with the "unaccented" Polish of, say, Andrzej £apickiLOL

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Wulkan, "RP" is an artifice! It's as much a construct as Polish stage diction and sounds utterly ridiculous nowadays, trust me on that one:-)

Films such as "Topsy-Turvy" in the late '90's were all but sleepers in the UK, having their widest audiences OUTSIDE Britain.

Motto: NOONE SPEAKS LIKE THE QUEEN EXCEPT HER MAJESTY!!! (....and I might add, "NOR WANTS TO")

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

There IS however a sort of middle-ground English accent somewhere between a working-class Russell Crowe (an Aussie however, not a Brit!!) and a super-efite Alan Corduner as Sir Arthur SullivanLOL

Things needn't be so bloody black-white, people!

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

True enough, McDouche! Though why confine this complaint to the Poles??

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Delphiandomine, most immigrants, as opposed to visitors or exchange students, may never get their new language up to speed. This isn't their purpose. They prefer to "communicate", period. Let the chips fall where they may!

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Above all, speaking and being CORRECTED by an educated native speaker is key to learning another language successfully, that is, ACCURATELY as well as merely "fluently":-)

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Depends on the type of correction! Every other word?? Certainly not, I agree! However a gentle, corrective 'recast' after a particularly faulty sentence will only help to reinforce the model in the learner's mind, so that they aren't aware of the correction:-)

My first Polish teacher would correct me at nearly every bend and turn! Sure I'd get frustrated in the beginning, but after a while, I realized it was necessary. After all, I was learning as an adult, not as a child and so reinforcement was an absolute must in order to (literally!) "cement" in both the structures as well as the noun's gender. I still have to think on occasion about the gender of a noun. This admittedly is much more important in writing than speaking.

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

Contemporary German inflectional morphology PALES by comparison with Polish:-) Where German's four cases are often quite repetitive, the seven active cases in Polish differ from one another at the drop of a hat, rarely repeating! Although there is to be sure a certain regularity in certain noun declensions, the same can scarcely be said for the numerals.

Verbal "perfective" vs. "imperfective" aspects can also be a not so gentle challenge for the foreign Polish learner. Even in languages such as English or German which are governed typically by 'tense' not 'aspect', learning to distinguish their usage in Polish is sometimes enough to drive even the clearheaded among us to distraction:-) Mostly, this is because what English speakers see as requiring a completed action, for example, in Polish do not!

An analogy with German might be case governance. Even my advanced students would still have to sit and ponder why certain verbs which seemed like direct object (Accusative) actions in English, required the indirect (Dative) object in German, e.g. the verb 'folgen' (to follow) etc..

I continue to make mistakes in Polish aspectual distinctions.