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


Yep, I've seen visitors in Ireland get confused with that one! ;)

Maybe it's obvious, but it's worth mentioning that ambiguous questions like that are a direct echo of the Irish (Gaelic) sub-stratam; Irish has no present perfect as such. Like other such languages, the concept is expressed in other ways, particularly by context. Similarly, we say things like, 'I'm only after doing that' (lit: tá mé tar eis é sin a dhéanamh') for "I have just done that'..

One of the interesting theories behind this is that when Irish began to be widely spoken in Ireland in the 17th and 18th century many of the teachers were native Irish-speakers and therefore spoke English as a learned language, often almost entirely from books, with a lot of direct translation and then taught this to their students. What began as English as a foreign language became a new dialect of English, Hiberno-English.

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


Absolutely, and it also depends on your previous experience with other languages: English is my mother tongue and I also speak Spanish and Irish (Gaelic) and I have studied Japanese more recently. There is a lot to learn in Polish, a hell of a lot, but Japanese was still more difficult. I feel that with Polish, as a speaker of other Indo-European languages - albeit non-Slavic ones - I'm still on more familiar terrain than I was with Japanese.

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

Hi Milky,

Ní raibh mé ag iarraidh masla a thaibairt d'éine! They were just exaggerated examples to illustrate a point, the intention was humourous.

Regarding versions of Irish history: some of the die-hard revisionists are also 'nutcases', I know. I don't believe there is an either/or choice between nationalism or revisionism, however.

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

Well, here's my own tuppence worth - and, no, I haven't been able to read every single message on this thread, But I recently spent four days in Kraków, which was my first time in Poland. And I Loved it. No, it's not perfect or glossily wonderful, nowhere is; outside of storybooks and tourist brochures. It's real and human. I've been to many countries, everywhere you get the good, the bad and the indifferent.

But the observation I would like to make here is that people often move to other countries and when they experience something negative that could really happen anywhere, they simple blame the country and portray the problem as some sort of broad cultural characteristic. I lived in Spain for many years and noticed the exact same thing, particularly among English-speaking expats. Indeed some of the dislikes listed here are the *exact* same bitter little complaints you could frequently hear from foreign residents in Spain. When I returned home to Ireland some years ago it was a relief to be able to stop viewing the world through a prism of national stereotypes; so, when someone rips you off they're a con artist not necessarily a typical Irish person, when someone says something bigoted or racist, they're a racist and not a typical Irish person, when someone skips a queue or almost runs you over in their car, they're idiots .. not typical Irish people. When someone rants about Irish history in a crudely simplistic, rabble-rousing manner they're nationalist nutcases, and not representative of every single Irish person etc etc