Is Polish amongst the best-sounding languages in the world?

We say that about Russian language and they say Polish sounds like baby talk also lol. I've also heard from my Mexican friend that it sounds hard, macho.


I think so too, you hear it properly some Poles talk real fast and it sounds like one long mumbled word.

personally I think French is.

French is overrated. It's a wonderful language to sing, but doesn't sound so great in normal conversations IMO.
I like Italian (and Italians). Get 5 Italians together and you'll be given a wonderful spectacle of everyone screaming over each other and making a ton of incomprehensible gestures. My Italian friend always laughs that there are so little vowels in Polish. Teaching her to pronounce "Jestem Włoszką" was a hillarious experience.

LOL, my Italian friends say the same thing! (about lack of vowels). But Italian is beautiful, and I love how they have hand gestures for everything hahaha! But Italians are some of the friendliest people I ever met.

It would be cool to learn Polish but it looks very difficult and it would be hard finding opportunities to speak it.

Hahaha! Those are my wife's EXACT words. :)

yes, many people say that...
and chichimera's video is quite accurate... :)

Pennboy wrote:


I live in the south now and I can certainly attest to what that teacher is talking about. The english down here is abominable. The most embarrassing is when I receive a text message from someone who can't even speak properly because they type words and fragments that literally aren't recognizable but it's all because they don't know how to put the mess that comes out of their mouth on a daily basis onto paper because it's comprised of words and sounds that don't really exist.

this would be most certainly a mild example, but I hear "I would have went" from nearly everyone down here. past participles are simply non existent along with most adverbs.

anyway, back on topic folks. this thread is starting to look like another one of those threads.

Absolutely not. To many sibilants. No Slavic language sounds good. The best sounding languages are Romance, like French or Italian. They sound, ahhm, balanced.

The Slavic languages sound far better than French or Spanish. Italian has too many stressed syllables.

That makes two of us.

Polish language sounds good but Czech is more interesting.Generally what a foreigners hears in polish is the intonation which falls peculiarly 3 syllables before the end and the sounds ps,sczc sth like that.These do not occur in other slavic languages.The result is that Poles make peculiar mistakes in intonation when speaking other languages(for example in Greek the tone is usually one syllable before the end and in French in the last syllable).

Generally in cinema Russian sounds a lot better.Another thing is of course the slavic sounds pronounced by feminine slavic lips which can cause to a foreigner wet dreams.For example these ps,scz etc.I don't know if it is due to sexy sounds per se or just a Pavlov's dog effect.

^
You've got something wrong buddy. We put stress on penultimate syllable, almost always.

I was told by a Czech guy all Czech words were almost always stressed on the first syllable. The Czech guy has even managed a nice joke:

-- Do you know what Czech word is not only stressed on the first syllable but also pronounced with a long vowel?
-- No, tell me?
-- Pán
;-)

Thank god long vowels disappeared from Polish a while ago, it'd be a nightmare to pay attention to such things.

There's lots more words like that, actually :-)

My favourite Czech sentence: povznesli se se seseèené louky (the got up from the mowed meadow). It's doesn't look like much when written down, but try saying it quickly ;-)

^ Is it a Czech version of "Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzyszynie?"

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A good one! I also heard that tongue-twister about some Greek guy who'd asked me how many Greek rivers had been there in Greece, and I answered that I didn't know how many Greek rivers were there in Greece ;-)

Have you tried this Polish one Magdalena (with reference to your se se se se):
-- Przywiozłem nóż do sera, ze Szwecji (I've brought a cheese-knife from Sweden)
-- No to co że ze Szwecji? (So what that's from Sweden?)
;-)

That's nothing. How about:

třiatřicet stříbrných stříkaèek stříkalo nad třiatřiceti stříbrnými střechami

:-)

In descending order, I'd have to put in my two zł. worth here:

GERMAN - the tradtional language of Lied and love (think only of the 'Minnesaenger' mediaevel troubadors!)

ESTONIAN

SWEDISH - those Bergman films!!! (Ah, and those x-rated 'blue movies' from the 60's f.ex. 'Jag ar nyficken gul' etc.)

ICELANDIC

POLISH -

ITALIAN - the language of opera, Fellini etchetera...-:)

(BRITISH) ENGLISH - Allen Corduner reciting Gilbert & Sullivan, John Gielgud doing Hamlet ......

Actually long vowels are quite funny.When a Czech for example slightly prolonges the length of vowels or uses lots of not vowels(how do you call them) combined with long vowels it sounds funny.They also can give variety to intonations in this way or even sing.For example in Prague they say jak se mas? pronouncing it jak se maas? while singing and stressing both jak and mas.So it is like enetring a different dimension more artistic.

I personally like Russian, Czech, some dialects of English, esp. southern US and northern UK, Finnish I absolutely love to listen to, they might be reciting a telephone directory for all I care - just let them talk... :-)

Finnish is indeed an attractive language! I remember being at a reading of excerpts from the 'Kalevala' many years ago at Columbia University. It sounded almost as though it were being sung, not spoken. Guess that was sort of the idea!

Bardic literature, e.g. Scaldic poetry from the Old Norse, has a briny, bristly sound, quite unlike modern English. Then again, there's always Scots.

Many poems of Iwaszkiewicz are heartbreakingly beautiful in the original, such as "Prze cały biały dzionek czekam"

No Polish Magdalenka??


What's wrong with the Northern?
youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jOltf7rS-mM
Standard(Hollywood) from the video sounds the nicest to me

BTW isn't it just a myth that there are that many "sz" "rz" sounds in Polish? I think foreigners get that impression as on the very first lesson they learn some elementary words in Polish that happen to have a lot difficult to pronounce sounds eg. "przepraszam", "dziękuję", but overall I'd say it's not that bad. Germans have a lot of "sch" (sz) and "ch" (ś) and similar and no one ever complains.

I like the melody of Polish anyway, it's much more melodic for songs than English IMO, which is sadly dominating worldwide music market (it should be more diversified IMO). :(

youtube.com/watch?v=f0PVkrW62Dw
youtube.com/watch?v=Ts7p8Y6QOsI

I think you're right there aren't that many, they just get freaked out when they hear a word or two with them and fear they wont pronounce it right, give up. Polish has a lot of As especially at the endings, also "ka" it's pretty much pronounced like it's written like Spanish.

My name is MAGDALENA. Thank you.
Polish? Sounds OK to me - but apart from being a language I grew up with, it does not move me one way or another. Not the sound of it, anyways ;-)


Nothing. Did I say there was?

What do you mean by that? General ortography rules are kinda similar to Spanish, but a lot of other lanugages are pronounced like they are written - it's only English when pronunciation and spelling don't have much in common LOL


Madziusia?

There aren't millions of them hissing phonemes in Polish by I'd say the number is very large relative to the pool of sounds a foreigner may be used to:

sz
cz
ś
ć
ź
ż
dź
dż
dz

Compare it to English where, to a foreigner, all it takes to get them confused is /æ/ and /ɑ/ (IPA). And when you're look really close (using RP as reference) then it turns out that Polish and English share very few sounds that are considered identical. Don't quote me on that because it's been decades since I looked at comparative spectograms, but I think only 3 of them are identical between Polish and English: m, n and another one I forgot.

Sorrry.. Co ci się tak nie podoba ze zdrobnieniem?


I know.. Spanish was just an example, i used it because Spanish also has many As


U said you prefer the southern over the "standard" America, i can see how anyone possibly could lol