Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D

.....and "kinda" associating Jewish women with whores, right? Lovely:-)
How would you react if the Polish word 'Polak' were used in English as a term meaning 'stupid person'? Would you react as casually then?

Lol, WHAT?! I meant that it's a regular word for a Jewess. Word for a whore is much different.

Apparently my Polish lexicon was wrong.

I can assure you that it was.

ooooh kurwa ten język polski...jak trudno!!

naprawda??

The word for Jewish woman is not derogatory at all. Don't be an idiot.

4 genders in Romanian? Are you sure?


Actually, English has two cases - Nominative and Possessive, the latter sometimes referred to as Saxon Genitive. The third case is Objective.

I'd hardly call tagging 's at the end of a word a proper case. Only pronouns really have cases in English, and once you've learned them, you don't ever have to worry about them again.

By the way, I'm curious if anyone knows whether there is any European language that has more declension- and conjugation patterns than Polish. I know Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have a lot of cases, but I understand they only have one gender, and that these cases are marked by tagging endings at the nouns (correct me if I'm wrong). I know that Bulgarian verbs are super complex, but at least they got rid of the noun cases. It would be interesting to know in which European language you have to know the greatest number of rules to be able to inflect all regular verbs, nouns and adjectives, but I'm sure that would be extremely hard to calculate.

Poles like WASTING SIXTEEN years of their lives caught in impossible grammar rules.

No wonder 80% of Poles have certificate of disease "dizortografia"... that is so funny that it hurts... 80% of Poles cannot even write correctly in THEIR OWN LANGUAGE :))))

That is how hard polish is...

WOO!

Hold your horses!
SEVEN genders? Seven? I'd like the author of the article to name them;)

And being fluent in your mother tongue on average age of 12? Ridiculous.

Polish the hardest language? It's very hard indeed, but what about e.g. Finnish. Or languages with no alphabet for people who know only alphabet-based languages? Or click languages? This article is bollocks! But it started a very nice discussion though :)

The problem is that this "youthspeak" is increasingly present in mainstream media in Poland.


That's from an ad in a Polish magazine.

The truth is that different persons need different teaching methods.


Nominative
Accusative
Genitive
Dative
Instrumental
Locative
Vocative

Not genders, cases. There are seven cases (the ones listed by SzwedwPolsce) and three genders (masculine, feminine, neutrum)

Darek,

Rather surprised you misunderstood my post. Where the heck did I ever say or imply that I thought Romanian had four genders??! I was in fact responding to someone who misunderstood my English, thinking that I was speaking about gender, when I was really discussing case:-)

Apologize for the confusion!

No need. I re-read and I was the one who was confused.

No prob, mate:-) I'm confused on a reg'lar basis LOL

Cheers!

That depends how to count. If you'd like to be precise you'll end with 5 genders in Polish examples in Accusative:

1. Masculine animate personal (nowego ucznia | nowych uczniów)
2. Masculine animate impersonal (nowego psa | nowe psy)
3, Masculine inanimate (nowy kapelusz | nowe kapelusze)
4. Feminine (nową uczennicę, nową książkę | nowe uczennice, nowe książki)
5. Neuter (nowe dziecko, nowe krzesło | nowe dzieci, nowe krzesła)

Sometimes you can even meet additional 2 for plural:
6. Masculine personal (plural for gender 1)
7. Not Masculine personal (plurals for genders 2-5)

Of course the teacher should take under consideration learners aprroach but we cannot change the specificity of the Polish language. I belive everybody in an individual, but mechanism is general. Especially at the begining of the learning process teaching methods

should be very similar for everybody. Of course it they work (-:


Male, Female, Neutrum

but also in Plural

Male people/personal gender and Not male people/personal gender

That is why you say:

"profesorowie byli" but "koty były" however "profesor" is male and "kot" is male in singular

And
male animated versus male inanimate
this is important in Acc. and Gen. plural

In plural we make also a difference between

male personal and male animated

So it looks like seven I am afraid (-:

But the point is not how many cases we have.
Polish is like a machin which has logic inside
If you understand how it works and you get efficient
exercises to practise it you can learn it very fast.

But to do it you need a succesful method which depends more on
Polish language requirement then on individual expectations of learners.

Polish has an objective structure. If you want to speak Polish you have to get
inside it. Nevermind if you like it or not (-:

It then comes down to how one defines gender. The categories previously listed are to me only subcategories of the three (3) basic genders masculine, feminine and neuter, rather than including various subdivions such as animate/inanimate etc..

Forgive me if I am in error; I am not a native speaker of Polish; I assumed that there was a difference, morze being s t r e t c h e d and also having the "r" voiced whilst może is shorter and there is no hint of the "missing" "r"

This is how I have been informed by native speakers.

Polish is a hard language to learn for sure. But I think the hardest European language to learn is Hungarian. Well, seems like it ;)

Often, even educated native speakers without a background in linguistics or language teaching have strange ideas about the connection between writing and speech.

Some years (well, centuries) ago there was a difference and it was similar to the one described (and still exists in Czech roughly). But the difference disappeared a long time ago in Polish. I don't know of any dialect of Polish that maintains the distinction. If these native speakers do (and can accurately perceive it in blind tests) then they should contact a linguist to write it up and get it published.

As Mafketis says, there's no difference, morze and może are homonymes meaning that they sound exactly the same.
The "r" is voiced in words having the combination r+ż, like drżeć or rżysko, and in a few other words: marznąć, mierzić and their derivatives (zmarznięty, zmarzlina) - here "r" and "z" are pronounced seperately. But these are exceptions.

1. Not 16, but earlier in my opinion;). And it is not hard if you ACQURE language not only LEARN.

2. Are you joking? When I was at school I didn't hear about such things as "disortografia", "disgrafia", "dislexia" or "discalculia". Yep, those notions made popular later. Also we did not hear then about ADHD. There were just people who had to study harder or repeat a semester or they had bad marks from behaviour;). And definitely not 80% Poles have such "certificate" - that's rubbish just as much as stating that 80% of Polish society cannot wrte correctly in their mother tongue.

A bit more about correct speaking native language.
One day I taught Polish to a professor from Department of English of University, Fresno CA. He told me that he could not correct language mistakes of his students because it would be treated as a kind of racism (-: (-: (-:

If so, I admit that speaking good Polish is really a bit more difficult because we are still obliged to keep rules and norms.
But, seriously, I will repeat: Problems with the Polish language reflect just general problems with the Polish identity. Polish is mostly taught wrongly and Polish people do not know how to promote it.

On the other hand, foreigners listen to nasty things about Polish with pleasure because it justifies their - OOPS! - laziness.

It is not surprising for me to see people who start communicating in Polish after two months of learning. But of course it requires a bit of time, energy and money.

If somebody has lived in Poland for years or have a Polish partner/ family,
then he or she prefers to hear that Polish is the hardest language in the world
than: Get grip on yourself, you are just a lazy guy!!! (-:

Yes, this is true Andy! I'm far from a native speaker myself Lord knows, but what seem to us to be the slightest permutations in pronunciation between, say, 'może' and 'morze', 'czy' vs. 'trzy', or 'cieszyć się' and 'cieszać się' etc., spoken at a normal speed, are more often than not crystal clear to Poles.

Takes a while for our "old ears" to become used to:-))

The structure of the Polish language mirrors that of the Polish mind: an island of rationality surrounded by an ocean of irrationality (or vice versa!)

Polish is very logical. Of course we have VERY FEW exceptions. But the propotion is like 97:3
Even if you ignore exeptions you can understand almost everything. Until you haven't learnt the rules you think that the order is chaos. If you know a few rules but you do not practise using them you think there are too many rules.

Polish is logical and does not have many exceptions - but I know myths are very often stronger than facts :)

Every language mirrors the culture in which it was conceived. English reflects the colonial, expansionist tendencies of the British Empire as well as the tremendous influx of change which beset that tiny island (compared with Japan, for instance, which was somehow able to remain an island nation and ward off almost all foreigners until Commodore Perry round about the 1850's!). German is a product of both a historical territory without natural borders, hence an overriding obsession with order in both expression and life, i.e. the need, thus desire, to control and regulate, plus the slavish devotion to replicating the superior ancient world of the Romans by copying Latin grammar and making the German language one of dizzying structural complexity.

Yes, I know that well. But the author of that article didn't:) and that was my point, that if someone starts an article like that then the quality of their research (if any) is poor.