News / What awaits Poland after EU surrender [14]


From Iran, yes (as long as the current government and legal system is in place - if they join the 21st century, then we'll see....)

From Cameroon, I don't know, but most sub-saharan African countries are also pretty oppressive to gay people (see recent Malawi case).

And ... in such cases their asylum should be revoked upon the first sign an individual is playing gay to get asylum (no "Oh I used to be gay but now I'm cured" if they get over the gay they can get back to where they came from).

Work / Some opinions about current pay rates (normal pay per hour for housekeeping in Poland)... [19]

The usual term if it's mostly housework with some childminding thrown in is 'gospodyni' (at least that's what the Polish people I've known who have one call them).

Language / Do Poles prefer US American or UK English language? [147]

Up until about 2004 I'd say it was roughly 50/50 among those with a preference based more than the idea that English English was more correct or proper.

When Poland joined the EU and Poles started migrating to the UK British became very dominant (and W Bush was generally unpopular here so that didn't help anything).

I'd say (maybe) in the last year or two American has regained some popularity but it's still nowhere near where it was pre-EU.

In commie times some Poles who'd never heard (or heard of) Black English did kind of freak out when they heard it live the first time in the US. "What language are they speaking?" was a common reaction.

IME younger people now are curious about it and not freaked out at all. A fakultet (elective) course in an English department on Black English would probably be pretty popular.

News / Will Komorowski be Poland's worst ever president? [72]

First, campaigning and governing are two separate skills. You can be good at one without being good at the other.

That said, I'm glad BK won but I don't honestly expect much from him.

But then the Polish presidency isn't such an important post so it's hard to screw it up too much. I do think he'll be slightly less likely to engage in pointless bickering over protocal so I guess that's something.

If people get that upset over what PO does then they can force early elections, like last time.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]

Has he ever?

News / Komorowski won Poland's presidency vote? [125]

Glad I slept through the neck and neck part (especially the duck in the lead part) and finally awoke in a Poland that's just for "filthy-rich tycoons, lobbyists, crafty wheeler-dealer types and assorted, yuppies, eggheads and snobs" as Polonius3 would put it. Yahoo!

News / Komorowski won Poland's presidency vote? [125]


I don't know .... all three major polls show Komorowski ahead with the lowest number at 51.0. But of course I don't know the margin of error........

On the other hand, would PiS survive if he won? The president can't (I think) belong to a political party and PiS doesn't have any other potential leaders as far as I can tell.

Life / Talking over people in conversations; is it a Polish trait? [41]

This is actually something linguists have studied, how people in different cultures organize conversation, especially how long the breaks between speakers are and/or how much turns overlap. There are clear patterns across cultures (along with variety within cultures).

I've never seen data for Polish people but my gut feeling is that they probably overlap a little more than US speakers but not by much.

The champions in one study were Cubans. For them often a conversation had more time with both rather than just one person speaking.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]


I'm a lot more sympathetic to people who'll be voting for JK because they want deadlock than for those who think he'd do anything good......

Language / Your perception of the Polish accent [145]


jejku..... I hope your political info is more accurate than your geographic info

Poland: 312,685 km2 = 120,696.41 sq mi

UK: 243,610 km2 = 94,060 sq mi

Poland is bigger than the UK but nowhere near twice as big,

or did you mean England? 130,395 km2 = 50,346 sq mi

Others have pointed out some of the reasons there aren't as many different regional accents in Poland as in the UK. I'll mention two more:

- regional accents aren't much tied to identity the way they are in the UK

- Polish spelling is a lot more rational than English spelling. Those Polish people who want to lose their regional accent can do so largely just by following the spelling while English spelling obscures the pronunciation which makes it harder for speakers to get rid of stigmatized features.

Work / Studying in Poland in Polish or English? I need a better option. [9]

Neither will be easy. Polish is a hard language to learn quickly. A school in £ódź used to prepare students for university level clases within a year but it's a lot of intense work.

On the other hand, Polish faculty tend to teach better in Polish (as it's the language of all spheres of life in Poland). Also English as spoken (and written) by Polish people is liable to vary a lot from what you're used to. And that will also take a period of adjustment.

Regardless of the language of studies, you'll definitely need to learn Polish well as most people in Poland are not interested in accomodating foreigners who live here and don't know Polish (they're okay with helping short term visitors and/or tourists but will be perturbed if you don't make rapid enough progress in Polish). And the bureaucracy is all in Polish.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]


Well with Poland's particular system there's no guarantee a government can last five years, the last PiS government didn't.

And the president isn't such an important position (the powers of the position are all negative).

And BK is not in the league of Lepper (convicted criminal whose policies have no basis in reality) or K-M (who fortunately doesn't know any better than to say what he thinks which keeps him safely marginalized). He's a competent, if unspectacular and not very charismatic politician.

If JK wins, expect more of the same as the country got from his brother (constant bickering over trivial issues of protocal and/or roadblocks for the sake of roadblocks).

If BK there will be something different, I'm curious about what it might be.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]

Poland had a PiS/PiS government and most people didn't like it (since PiS invited proto-fascists and known criminals into their government),

it had a PO/PiS government and wasn't much happier about it,

why not try a PO/PO government for a change?

If they don't like it, they can always try something different.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]

I wonder, wonder, wonder ......

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]


And he never forgave them for that slight....

Life / Does anybody care about the elections in Poland? [26]


**** off every other country for no good reason and bring about deep buyers' remorse as quickly as possible?

(what I expect to happen should he win)

Language / będzie potrafił? [34]

To further muddy the waters,

umiem to zrobić - I know how to do it

wiem, jak to zrobić - I know how to do it

IIRC the difference for most speakers is the first implies that you've done it before, while the second doesn't (or maybe it's the other way around, my mind is a little muddied itself at the moment)

Life / Cosmetic surgery in Poland... [40]

My advice, unless you have a real physical problem and/or debilitating condition - dont do it.

Many people who go in for cosmetic procedures are thinking about some feature in isolation (instead of how it works with the rest of their looks) and forget that changing that one feature changes how everything else looks in relation to everything else. The overall result (to me) almost always seems to be a net loss in terms of attractiveness. Just my opinion....

Language / Can you recognise the nationality of foreign Polish speakers by their accent? [43]

Don't Silesians do something like that too?

Love / I'm a black African man and can't cope with my Polish mother in law [34]


Well in her culture, not really. In a lot of Polish families the idea is that getting upset and yelling some is no big deal. Nobody wants that all the time but a certain amount of arguing doesn't bother most Polish people. Loud arguments don't really indicate a lack of respect or concern for each other. If anything she'd be showing a lack of respect if she didn't try to impose her will (it's hard to understand but that's the way Poland is).

My advice is yell back some or at least be open to arguing. Don't overdo it, but most of the time Polish people respect people who show some temprement and stand up for themselves and they don't respect people who sulk or expect to be 'respected' but won't engage in negtiation or give and take.

News / Komorowski - Russian stooge, traitor background [42]


Who are you talking about? Komorowski's father? Kaczynski's father? Both? Someone else?

Language / będzie potrafił? [34]

This brings up the old commie slogan - Polak potrafi!

I might (very freely) translate that into modern American as "Poles get it done!" or "Poles can get it done!" (I think the plural is more idiomatic in modern English)

Language / będzie potrafił? [34]

I would say that potrafić is neither perfective nor imperfective (being both is functionally the same as being neither). It's one of the places where that distinction breaks down (or has broken down with this one verb).

Semantically, it seems (in my non-native intuitions) to be more perfective in that it implies some kind of completed action.

Morphologically and etymologically it looks perfective too (perfective trafić = plus a prefix po-). And IIRC there used to be an imperfectve counterpart potrafiać which is no longer used.

But as będzie potrafił indicates, it functions syntactically in modern Polish as an imperfective.

USA, Canada / Polonian or Polish food in America better? [26]


Polish people in Poland have a hard time finding the ingredients to make Polish food? What the....?

IME American raw ingredients don't have the right taste, while the finished product may be okay it doesn't have that Polish taste. I've never had ogórki kiszone in the US that compared with Polish ones.

The same thing works in reverse, I find it hard to replicate the taste of home prepared American food in Poland. I tried using maślanka in a recipe that called for American style buttermilk and the result just wasn't the same... (I like drinking maślanka more than American buttermilk, but it's not so good in cooking while American buttermilk makes any dish it's in better).

News / Komorowski for complex-ridden Poles? [94]

A vote for Komorowski is basically a vote for Tusk.

He (Tusk) has said and done some dumb things in the past but IMO he's basically not too horribly wrong in where he wants the country to go (how's that for a rining endorsement?)

It would also be interesting to see what would happen without the deadlock between a PO PM and president.

A vote for Kaczyński is basically vote for all the things that most non-PiS voters disliked about his brother and more so.

His biggest strength is in deal making while his biggest fault is ... deal making. Barely has the ink dried on the last agreement before he wants to re-negotiate. That's one major reason PiS never got anything done when they had the chance. That and all the wasted time putting the fools and charlatans of SO and LPR into the government.


Oh you naive dreamer. A candidate has to be a fool to take a specific position on a specific issue (in this particular election). Both candidates prefer image and vague slogans to real positions that they could be held accountable for.

I'll reformulate slightly:

A vote for Komorowski is a vote for more of what Tusk has been doing.

A vote for Kaczyński is a vote for more of what his brother had been doing.

We're not gonna get anything more concrete than that (actually I don't think we need it). Anyone who expects anything else than what I've written is in denial, misguided or a fool.

USA, Canada / US Polonia 70% for Kaczyński [343]

It's not a cult of personality, it's one of the ... defining features of the Polish political scene.

In short, a political party is a vehicle for a specific leader and any dissent means the dissenter leaves to either retire from politics or start up his own vehicle. The term used to be 'pocket party' in Polish and it's what both PiS and PO have turned into.

Ironically, they both started as attempts to create traditional kinds of European political parties with different voices and internal debate but both quickly devolved into leadership vehicles for the Kaczynskis and Tusk repsectively as anyone with any kind of serious disagreement with the leaders were muscled or frozen out.

The only real political parties in any traditional sense are SLD and PSL. And although PSL has largely become the vehicle of Pawlak, but it predates and will survive him whereas I doubt if PiS or PO could survive the departure of their current leaders.

SLD of course had the advantage (if you want to call it that) of inheriting a party structure and functioning like a political party by doing little things like keeping internal squabbling mostly out of the public sphere and grooming younger members to play important roles in the party, both of which are neglected by PiS and PO as far as I can tell.

Life / Babcia klozetowa alive & well? [35]

I can stand watching movies with lektors if they're not in English. But the lektor destroys the movie for those who speak the original language as their native tongue (no matter how well they know Polish).

And .... when two different languages are being spoken at the same time it just sounds ... ugly, it's a very unaesthetic experience.

Sometimes I wish someone could get a native speaker of English to do an English lektor track over a Polish movie so Polish people could understand how terrible it sounds to other people.

As for babcia klozetowa I can't say I've met any recently. My two favorite memories:

Wrocław train station (early 90's) all the stalls are filled and i'm in a .... hurry. The helpful babcia walks up to one stall pounds on the door and yells at the guy to vacate ASAP.

Near Warsaw old town during 2002 WC, the sociable babcia starts talking to me and handicapping the WC from her post just as I'm getting down to business. I try to keep up my end of the conversation but it wasn't easy.

USA, Canada / US Polonia 70% for Kaczyński [343]


I think they do, but ...

A lot of Polish in the US don't have US citizenship.

Even if you give up other citizenship, some governments (including, I think, Poland) will issue you another Polish passport. What the US government doesn't know won't hurt the dual passport holder.

USA, Canada / US Polonia 70% for Kaczyński [343]


Plus, they've never had to live under a government with a Kaczynski in charge.

Most of the Napieralski (and JKM) votes were protest votes against Komorowki's gaffe-prone campaign and most of those should go to Komorowski in the next round.

But my biggest fear is the run off. A lot of potential Komorowski voters will be on vacation and the PiS voters won't.

As one talking head on tv said, in the first round (Polish) people vote for lots of different reasons, in the second round they vote against the candidate they like least. I imagine that despite the core popularity of JK he has bigger negatives than BK.

If JK does, somehow win, I expect the Polish public will find out just how little he's changed and regret trusting him (just as they regretted trusting him the first time around).

That isn't to say I completely dislike him. I just think that PiS functions better as an opposition party than a governing one.