Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

My style of writing is literate and my words well chosen. Kindly don't project your own mediocre English writing if it doesn't measure up to my level!

Your English actually isn't half bad, I must admit. There are mistakes however. You presumably aren't an English teacher, so you're "forgiven".

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

"I too" is NOT a mistake, Wulkan! "I too" = I also, I as well (Ja też)

Now you presume to teach us English???!LOL Never once when posting here regarding the Polish language did I ever correct a native Pole concerning their own native language. Nor did I ever claim that I was anything other than a non-native speaker^^

I can see where you people get your gall.

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Paulina et al, my prior point was that here in the States, typically if someone is hired as a French instructor at any prestigious language school, they must speak basically a perfect, native French. As far as the teaching of English is concerned, no such standard applies any longer. Many whom I've met who "teach" English have noticable foreign accents and are often blithelly unfamiliar with Anglo- American culture, banter, word play and essentiallly communicate on a most primitive level, masquerading as "international communication".

As far as this overused word "obsessing", it's hardly obsessive to kindly ask that if a Pole, German, Swede etc.. tacitly insists that they already know enough English so that an American, say, needn't spend time studying Polish, German or Swedish, is it too much to ask that the English of the foreign interlocutor be at least aesthetic and modest? Need younger Europeans pretend that their ignorance of higher-level English is adequate enough, more important even than a foreigner taking the time to read Mickiewicz, Goethe or Strindberg in the original? It was a nice experience many years back when I met an Austrian accountant who not only knew how to "communicate" in more or less unaccented American English, but could even quote some of the Mickado, chapter and verse!!!

I damned near started to mist up a little, realizing that there are some out there who've really taken the time to learn English as it should be learned. Only thirty-five years old and his English had ZERO slang fillers or vulgarity. Luckily, I maintained contact with this fellow and his wife, who tried to speak as well as he did. This was the first time I'd ever met a foreign native speaker who spoke their language about as well as I did. I dare say, his English was practically on a native-speaker level.

So there's hope yet:-)

PS
In the late 1980's when I was going out for a teaching post (for which I was eventually hired), I was sitting in the waiting area of the office. At one point, a middle-aged woman appeared with a slight Spanish accent, yet excellent English. I asked whether she was one of the English instructors, to which she almost bashfully replied that as good as her English might have been, she certainly could never teach English, as it "wouldn't be fair with my accent". Times certainly have changed!

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Magda, the more-or-less "standard" rule has been that at top flight colleges/universities, language institutes and so on, ALL foreign language instructional staff are supposed to be native or at the very LEAST, native bilingual speakers of the foreign language which they are teaching. I speak Swedish fluently, for instance. Yet no self-respecting school or educational institution would ever consider hiring me no matter how desperate they were, as ethically, I'm not anywhere near a native or even bilingual speaker of Swedish! This is as it should be (..and still is, by and large). I wouldn't, nor have I ever, deluded myself into thinking things should be any different. I have taught German at the college level, only because I grew up (as you did, I'm assuming), basically native to both tongues, in my case German/English. This therefore can be justified from an advertising standpoint. Case closed:-)

Concerning English as A Second Language programs throughout the country, far too often, Eastern Europeans especially, notably Poles, Russians, Hungarians and Serbo-Croatians, often slip past review boards and are allowed to teach English to foreigners, even when their English is accented and scarcely perfect.

So once again, why the double standard? English merrily butchered by practically anyone off the street, while e.g. French, must be taught and spoken by somebody with certificates from the Sorbonne and a clear Parisian pronunciation!!!

Isn't there something terribly wrong with this picture, people??

I dare to add at this juncture that when visiting Sweden umpteen years ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with a youngish English instructor from a local "gymnasium", i.e. "lyceum" in or around Goteborg. We just happened to be seated at the same table in the hotel restaurant where I was staying in town and, hearing my accent, asked me why I had learned Swedish. We got to talking and he was pleasant enough, although his English often had numerous errors which of course I was too polite to correct.

Having listened to him for a bit, I wondered to myself just how many generations of pupils were learning "svengelska" (Swedlish) without ever even realizing it:-)

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Your question was asked and answered, Magda!

Foreign language teachers across the board must ideally be native born (as it should be), ESL teachers don't. Whoever can finagle the best deal.

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Magda,

Sooooo, so many so-called "English instructors" have such thick foreign accents and faulty grammar, it's not even funny! Shows ya the price of cheap labor from the Black Market, eh?

:-)

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

As a non-native Polish speaker, I'd have to conclude that superficially at any rate, Polish is inflectionally harder looking than Czech. Though having never formally studied the latter, I'm not really able to judge:-)

Polish consonants I've observed have more permutations, for instance "s", "sz" "ś". As far as I know, neither Czech nor Russian have the very latter. For this reason, many people with whom I've spoken find Polish pronunciation more challenging.

On the other hand, Russian palatalized consonants as well as the hard vs. soft signs drove me almost to distraction.
With Polish, the pronunciation was the least of my worries:-)

@Jan Movie,
I too was so young when I first learned German, I developed a natural native pronunciation long before I studied it at university!

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

Your English isn't bad either, yet you still make some errors common amongst German native speakers.
Otherwise, it's darned good

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

My point is that, at fault at times as my Polish is, is it really any better or worse than the average European-born sinecure professor of English, who makes mistakes no end, yet is rarely called on these errors owing to a double standard? Poland and other countries are loathe to hire educated native-English speakers at all but perhaps the college level because it's simply too expensive.

I call this cutting corners in the wrong places:-)

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

My advice was in fact no more mistaken than half of most foreigners who learned English in their countries and teach it at university! I'm simply more honest about my abilities, that's all. In the classroom, I at least don't teach by intimidation as do many of my foreign colleagues whose frequent response to their students' questions about English culture is "Not important!" or "Go look it up!" etc..

Looks like the shoe's on the other foot now, eh Paulina?

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

Icelandic is morphologically much more unpredictable than German which has by far fairly repetitive adjectival inflections (Flexionsaufbau = case structure) compared with Icelandic and its noun mutations! Polish too inflects all nouns, as does Russian (though slightly less so), Finnish, Hungarian and many others following suit as well.

A basic Germanic word such as "land" in Icelandic mutates form from "loend", "landi", "landu" etc... for example, whereas German "Land" changes comparatively little in the singular. Polish "dom", "domu", "domem" also inflects constantly, this reflecting though its Indo-European morphology.

Was is difficult for you as a German native speaker to learn English? I grew up hearing the language, yet only studied it formally as a teen:-)

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

I certainly do acknowledge my own mistakes. What ever gave you that idea?

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Getting on one's nerves often serves the cause of enlightenment. I used to rail against similar teachers of mine, yet never regretted their finickiness in the long run! I grew from it.

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

As a native speaker, I'm still curious as to where you'd place German in all of this:-)

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

Typo error, Lino:-) Keyboard kapers, he-he )"capers" of course!

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Only if you allow yourself to worry. Otherwise, just sit back and enjoy the show:-)

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Many do, so don't let it worry youLOL

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

...to communicate both intelligently as well as above all INTELLIGIBLY with native Polish speakers, if you don't mind me telling:-)
Whilst many do indeed evince your level of conversation, I found far too often that I wasn't able to converse in English with them on the same level as I was in Polish. I ended up already knowing about and quoting from Pan Tadeusz, whereas most hadn't as much as a clue who Gilbert & Sullivan were etc.. Frustrating as all hell, you know?

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

We ain't crazy about Polish aspects either, but, hey, when in Rome......

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

The sooner others freely admit to their English faults as such, the sooner I'll "relax", as you put it. My sole point is that you all have to be as critical about the quality (as opposed to the sheer quantity) of what you're watching/hearing as we on the other side of the Pond have to be when viewing European movies without those annoying subtitles. Your English for instance is very good, no qualms there. However, don't you want to make it even better??? 'Course you do! So do Ironside, Wulkan etc. I too want to improve my language skills, e.g. Polish. We all want to learn new stuff, so there is no problem.

By the way, one needn't be "immersed in" foreign languages to want to speak them well. It's all a question of pride and respect, that's all it is.

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

Noone here ever suggested that Polish has seven GENDERS! It has seven CASES, but of course, that's another matter entirely. More than three genders? Well let's see now. If one counts the virile vs. non-virile masculine nouns etc.., I guess that makes about five:-)

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

Just curious as to whether or not your 'British' reflects RP (Received Pronunciation, i.e. the English of Her Majesty's) or that of the rank and file Londoner? Or is Aussie in these days? Even Cameron speaks watered down RP. The late Lady Di didn't (miraculously!!!), as do Charles or Camilla.

Oh well, the times they are a-changin'LOL

Your English isn't bad, by the way! Oh, there are few sentence structure thingies, but nothing that reading your posts a few times won't cure:-)

Life / Do Poles have a problem understanding American English? [76]

Many foreigners, Poles among them, often labor under the delusion (though understandably so) that listening to contemporary American movies in particular will somehow "improve" their English skills. The root of this fallacy is that by listening to people chattering away in a language necessarily builds comprehensive fluency, adequate for more than merely touristic discourse.

All this does in my mind is reinforce slang, whose level the learner cannot judge adequately in the first place, and then allows the learner to go about babbling this garbage to her or her heart's content, merrily deluding themselves into thinking that they automatically sound hip, idiomatic, cool and as someone(s) to be taken seriously. Rarely is this ever the case; they end up sounding ridiculous:-)

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

Paulina, every time a Pole opens his or her mouth, I can nearly always tell and this is owed in large part to this perennial confusion between Polish 'w', pronounced in Polish as though it were an English 'v', therefore often transferred into Polish pronunciation of English. This among other such idiocyncracies is commonly referred to as "second language interference" and is quite usual. Perhaps you too once were guilty of such. As I've never heard you speak, I honestly cannot judge your English pronunciation. Having dealt though with ambitious foreigners for decades now, I know that having native speaker-sounding English, i.e. 'American' is considered as important as having a driver's licence for American teenagers, so much so that folks are even known to lie about it:-)

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

Missed the last point, Wulkan. Who raised the issue of "silent" letters anyhow?? Not I, that's for sure:-)

@Paulina, as a Polish native speaker you naturally cannot judge how an attuned outside listener hears/perceives you pronouncing English! You have only to trust the ears of a foreigner who's heard Poles (miss-)pronoucning English for years. Part of Anglophone dialect comedy concerns Poles confusing the "W" of "will" with the "V" of "vote etc....

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

JanMovie,

To be sure, Lithuanian is indeed even more conservative than Polish! It's exceptionally complex declensional system rivals even Estonian in its apparent irregularity:-)

While I wouldn't call Polish "a piece of cake" (kinderleicht) by comparison, it has roughly more recognizable word stock and perhaps a tad more predicitablity than any of the extant Baltic tongues of which Lithuanian is considered the most complicated, especially for foreigners.

One of the many reasons for language difficulty depends upon the degree of historical isolation enjoyed respectively by the speakers of certain languages such as Estonian, Lithuanian, Polish, Icelandic, Basque, Sami and others. Compared with English, Spanish, French or Italian, the former have operated relatively apart from almost all linguistic trends, past or present. This raises though an interesting issue, namely is language difficulty a matter of the importance of said language? Well, languages as vastly different as German and Chinese are both immensely important and have a relatively wide geopolitical (not dependent though on their speaker percentages!), yet both are much more daunting for the foreigner than English is said to be:-)

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

More simply put, you SEE the letter, but you instinctively pronounce the sound or grapheme "phonetically", i.e. as you THINK the sound(s) should be spoken because you still hear them in your native tongue. This is what is meant by having a 'foreign accent':-)

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

I've heard Poles frequently confuse the "w" sound for a "v", Paulina.usion you mention may simply be visual, i.e.graphemic, rather than phonetic, that is, seeing the actual orthographic representation of the letter yet not being able to reproduce it correctly:-)

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

Wulkan, sorry to embarrass you, but mistaking a Polish "w" for an English "v" is but soooooo typical of Poles learning English, it's not even funny!! Perhaps you either refused to or simply COULDN'T hear your own leaner accent once upon a time, but believe me, it was there ^^

Whether or not you sound like a Brit, an Aussie or a Yank nowadays is really inconsequential:-)

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

Vot yu arrr tolkink, meestairr Voolkonn! Pawlleesh okzentt verrii haahtt gawtt reett awffLOL

Admittedly not all Poles evidence this sort of clodhopper speech pattern, yet all too many do (..and many end up teaching English right here in Forest Hills!!)

:-)