Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Try telling that to the average pupil of English! Most often, one hears either vulgarity maskerading as "communicativeness" read "naturalness", or, the 'stilted precision' you mention; there seems precious little in betweenLOL

Law / International student from Poland traveling to Norway on Karta Pobytu? [54]

By what yardstick then do you measure "interesting", jon? Majestic fjordscapes, cradle-to-grave security, fresh air and plenty of it, literate conversation etc.... Doesn't sound half bad to me, old boy:-)

Oh well, I guess there's the downside too - the smug, homogeneous descendents of Vikings, arrogant about their democracy while valiantly struggling with ethnic diversity... Mixed bag, I suppose.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

I actually couldn't concur with you more, Jon. My ire though is raised when, for example, various European nationalities in particular (and I think we all know which ones!!) appear on the one hand to blatantly discourage foreign visitors from attempting to speak their language, claiming that it sounds awful, at the same time, being encouraged by tongue-tied foreigners to by all means speak English, even though the English that person is speaking is usually MISspoken, hence, the double-standard; it's okay for Norwegians, as one example, to try to mimic the "cool" American idiom with some success, but it's somehow not okay for, say, an American of some language talent to try to mimic native Norwegian speech.

Something's cockeyed about this logic.

Law / International student from Poland traveling to Norway on Karta Pobytu? [54]

For the general tourist perhaps you're right. For the long-term sojourner, it may be a different story.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Academic, I think you mean. For either a foreign-born, non-native English speaker, or most people under thirty, maybe so. For educated, over fourty, native-born speakers of North American Standard, I beg seriously to differ!

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Aptly stated, old man! Spot on as well.

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Then I must take issue with your observation/opinion:-)

One person's pretension is another's effortless fluidity and erudite expression.

Polish is "hard" only relative to one's ability in the language, that's all.

Szczecinianin, the language "easiest" to communicate in though, may not necessarily be the language that is spoken best. The interlocutor's refusal therefore may result in a mere approximation instead of a seemless transference of ideas. Where once, a Polish or other scientist coming to the States might have hired out an interpreter to speak through a more fluent mouthpiece, nowadays, that same scientist prefers to mangle the English language instead:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Szczeczinianin, your comments are as much a reflection of the times we live in as they are of my posts. As expectation levels of language and culture have declined over the past half century or so, what was not to long ago deemed witty, enjoyable and well written, is now perceived (incorrectly, I might add!) as stuffy, pretentious and silly.

Sadly, we're living in a garden of saplings where once a forest of mighty Redwoods blossomed. Polish of today in movies ("Zmróż oczy") is scarcely comparable with that of "Popiół i diamanty", the English of "Perry Mason" on US TV some fifty years ago is so far superior in both acting as well as dialogue compared with nowadays, it's practically as joke to compare the two!

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

And for what forum, pray tell, would my comments be appropriate? On the contrary, the truth often seems threatening, i.e "pretentious" to those who'd just assume settle for second best! Up until round about 1970, ball park, news broadcasters on TV, e.g. the late, great Charles Collingwood, Walter Cronkite etc.. would interview guests, and one of them i particular (John Stevenson) would even gently but audibly recast a guest's faulty grammar for the purposes of bothe aesthetics as well as clarity.

Where are such men today?

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

....hopefully leaving their legacies to the rest of us clever ones from which we all may benefit:-)

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Szczecianin, what seems verbose to you, is actually just being descriptive and refuses to conform to the millisecond sound byte-style of information to which most people nowadays have long since become accustomed:-)

If only to keep flogging a dead horse, English just SEEMS easy because general expectations worldwide for level of usage have declined so abysmally, that's all. Surely language "changes", but there's a difference between additions to a language which come over centuries of gradual acceptance and sheer brain-dead laziness which has led to such utter flabbiness in vocabulary that I recently read (to my delight!!!) that certain law firms in New York will in fact put employees on notice for both dressing, above all speaking, too casually, i.e using "like", "cool", "awesome", "yeah-uh" and other filler words, not to mention the f-curse.

So you see, I'm not the only oneLOL

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Hmm, can't say as I quite blame your reaction. Anyway, let's hopefully learn from one another, in whatever the language:-)
That is after all the whole point of an open "forum", isn't it?

Back on course, the way that yours truly eventually learned Polish was through Polish movie watching WITHOUT English subtitles, employing instead POLISH-language closed captions and working my way chronologically from the late 40's through post-War Cinema up to the early 2000's! After attempting to master the language at the "organic" level of a child learning their mother tongue, I then took actual language classes for a little over four years prior to visiting Poland for the first (and unfortunately only) time in 1996. I read as much as possible and had many Polish acquaintances/clientele who preferred Polish to English:-)

That's basically it!

Language / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Davs, Denwaw!

First off, it's "Poland", furthermore, many Poles find Danish even harder to master than English:-)

That's my perspective.

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 / Is Polish an easy language to learn and is there a way of learning it easily? [105]

Among the Indo-European family, Baltic languages are on a par with Slavic languages both in terms of their apparent inscrutability to outsiders as well as their morphological conservatism, i.e. their propensity for retaining vestigial forms in their language, sort of the like the prehensile tail of certain contemporary fauna!

Among the Slavic sub-group, Polish is certainly among the most phonologically as well as morphologically complex.

Analogies on a scale of "difficulty" in this forum with Welsh, for example, are indeed accurate:-)

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

Life / Polish programs with Polish subtitles on TVP online have disappeared... [6]

As a Polish learner myself, I can only reiterate the personal significance of Polish-language subtitles for Polish movies. I trained my skills by watching either with Polish-language subtitles, or, (ideally) NONE at all, avoiding completely English or German captions!!!!

Tough as h**l at the beginning, but man what a difference in the end:-)

English subtitles for foreign films are also notoriously iffy! Sometimes, even while I was just starting to learn Polish, I'd be watching the movie and furiously trying to concentrate on the story/acting while reading the silly subtitles and think to myself, "Come on! Noone would say that in English!"

I'd then switch them off and probably got more of the actual dialogue than the stilted, unnatural rendering into English.

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":-)

Life / Polish programs with Polish subtitles on TVP online have disappeared... [6]

Juvenalia's fine, so long as it's "classic", or traditional and not this contemporary YA (Young Adult) garbage! I'll make a slight exception with Harry Potter. Other than that, there's little out there on a so-called more basic level which isn't sub-mental at the same time:-)

Don't be afraid to challenge yourself! Do you honestly want to sound in Polish, like so many a young Pole sound like a vulgar valley girl in English???

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.

Language / Polish Swear Words [1242]

Really, polson?? I always thought it simply meant ********-)

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

Most likely it does. Amazed to observe a twinge of self-effacement in this last post:-) Keep it up!

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

Portuguese, I've heard from both native as well as non-native speakers, is by the far the most complex Romance language apart from Romanian! While Portuguese doesn't have the burden of Latin declensions like the latter, nor the confusing-looking clitics of Scandinavian, Albanian or other Balkan languages, it's tense system is much more intricate than either French, Itialian or Spanish:-)

Do you agree?

Language / A little Polish grammar. Masculine, animate objects. [64]

What is confusing for first timers also can be the distinction in Slavic languages between masculine ANIMATE (NON-human) nouns, such as "pies", masculine INANIMATE, such as "samochód" vs. virile HUMAN nouns, such as "chłop" or "człowiek", not to mention but again the latter category of Polish nouns, this time though with 'feminine'-looking endings, notably "mężczyzna" etc., nonetheless declined as MASCULINE rather than feminine nouns!!

More on this topic, I'm sure:-)

What's tricky is, for example, "Widzę mój nowy stół." [= "table" - inanimate, i.e. non-human masculine accusative case], "Widzę moje psy." [= "dogs" - animate, i.e. living non-human masculine accusative case] BUT!!!: "Widzę mojEGO ojCA." (NOT: "Widzę mój ojciec.") because "father" is a living human noun and therefore requires GENITIVE case endings!!!!

Just takes oodles of practice:-)