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

Seanus wrote:


i think the point was that if it takes so long to learn Polish, what's the point of putting in so much effort if the payoff isn't there.

in the end, if you're not marrying a Polish person, or plan on staying here for your whole life, there are better, more productive and certainly more lucrative things to learn than Polish.

just off the top of my head, if I had chosen say France and lived there for 5 years, I'd come back to America speaking absolutely fantastic French, and I could probably find a job with it in a big city. Polish.....you can't even become fluent with it in that amount of time, let alone find a job with it in America....certainly not one that's gonna pay well.

Basically, in today's times, it's difficult to convince someone to study Polish, even when they live there.

sure, you would come up with excuses, you would learn French only because french people would refuse to communicate in English.

Polish language is not that hard, many words and grammar is based on Latin

or: "k**wo podła ty!"
youtube.com/watch?v=7pD2h1XfRj0
(quite unusual order of words, btw)


WRONG! "Ty ch*ju" :-)
Most Poles don't know how to spell it correctly, as is evident from graffiti on walls, but there should be "ch" :-)

hmm, you catched me;) I have never thought how to write it corrertly:P I've never used it in written language but... mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

Exactly everybody's point...

Polish guys you have to simplify your language, or "dizortografia" will be PANDEMIC

While on the subject of simplifying, how's about English simplifying/"reforming" its completely chaotic and out of synch spelling vs. pronunciation, huh? LOL

poland.gov.pl/The,Polish,Language,317.html

In spelling, one major difficulty for both foreigners and natives alike is the words with ż vs. rz, u vs. ó, and h vs. ch, since the pairs of sounds these letters or combinations of letters represent have identical or almost identical pronunciation. Polish grammar and punctuation abound in rules and twice as many exceptions to them. Predictably, Polish is said to be a rather difficult language to learn.

By the way, use of "h" and "ch" comes from a history, and is similar in some other Slavic languages. In the past, "h" and "ch" were spoken differently, now they're exactly the same (maybe apart from some traditional folk dialects).

Note, that "ch" corresponds with the Russian "x" (kh) and Czech "ch" (like in word, respectively: chleb / khlyeb / chleba ). The Polish "h" usually corresponds with the Russian "g" (like herb / gierb ) and Czech "h".

Said to be, but I still maintain English is a harder language to acquire an educated level of usage.

Most people though, cannot or choose not to acquire it:-)

I aggree with youuu.. I am a new learner of Polish.. I have been studying for 6 montsh.. And still I am not able to speak :D Incredible :D

Actually Czech 'h' usually corresponds with Polish 'g'

hlavni = glowny, hlas = glos, kniha = ksiega etc

It is the hardest; as in twardy or trudny?

trudny, najtrudniejszy.
Twardy is for rocks or week-old bread :)

You're right!... I actually fought about apparently rare Czech words of foreign origin, like "halo" (same in Polish)

It's worth mentioning, that Czech 'h' corresponds with Russian 'g' as well (glavnyi, golos, kniga).

Some reasons for this:

1. most beginning courses don't spend any time on intonation (incredibly important in spoken English and knowing about it will help your writing too). It's hard so it's left out. Other nuances like the count/non-count distinction and the meaning of articles are also left out. After a few years of learning, it's too late - most learners have fossilized bad usage so they have to unlearn a lot of what they think they know (and unlearning is harder than learning).

2. a lot of what is included in basic courses isn't real ..... English (any variety). It's a made up artificial version of the language that doesn't match anyone's real usage.

3. many learners take a 'who cares? it's only English!' approach. this is a direct result of mass learning by fiat - many learners just don't care and think any words they string together are fine as long as they're understood. To an extent they're right, but they shouldn't call the dumbed down pidgin that they use 'English'.


Well the _sound_ of h in old Polish was probably the same (more or less) as the current Czech h, but I've never heard any speakers that distinguish ch and h. Also, Polish speakers tend to hear Czech h as Polish ch.

Supposedly there are some dialects in the east or southeast that still distinguish ch and h but again, I've never heard them.

This is different from the old ł cause I have heard some older or kresowy speakers with the old 'stage ł', although they tend to not use it 100 % of the time and alternate it with the modern, mainstream pronunciation.

Once more, Mafketis, you and I find ourselves in total agreement on each of the several issues you raised in response to my message.

The sad part is, there has yet to be a significant wake-up call to alert people to the dangers as well as pitfalls of poor English usage. Perhaps if employers themselves were slowly but surely weened off of conformist thinking as to who fits in socially on the job, standards might again return to previous levels as they once were in the halcyon fifties, or to a certain extent, up through the early sixties! This is turn would begin closing more doors on more overly priviledged yet unqualified youth applicants out there, relying to an ever greater extent on cuteness and/or coolness, rather than actual good ol'fashioned skill level. Take away most of their Blackberries, smart (i.e. "stupid")phones ad nauseum, and what do you have??? Not much:-)

Put differently: The lights are on, but nobody's home.

The Borderland regional accent preserved H(voiced)/CH(unvoiced) distinction. I've heard it from my grandfather in HERBATA - CHERLAK. In H the larynx vibrated clearly.

In many Polish words H was borrowed from Czech for example:
HAŃBA (dishonor) was till XIV century GAŃBA in Old Polish.

Polish used to have G where Russian has G and Czech H:
GRÓD - GOROD - HRAD (castle, city)
G£ĘBOKI - G£UBOKIJ - HLUBOKI (deep)
GĘŚ - GUŚ - HUS' (goose)

H is present in borrowings from Czech, Germanic, Greek...

Ukrainian then shares with Czech, but not with Polish or with Russian, the 'h' instead of the 'g'-consonant in words such as Pol. "gołąb" vs. Uk. "holub" etc...

Actually the Ukrainian sound in question (Which does show up where Polish has 'g') is more like the gamma in Modern Greek before a, o or u (or g between vowels in Spanish as in hago). It's more of a voiced velar fricative.

Depending on the transliteration/transcription used, it's romanized as h or g.

see:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_transliteration

and

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

and

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Ukrainian_alphabet

Really interesting discussion. It adds so much.

What is your opinion guys on the reason why dizortografia is a modern pandemic
"disease" only in Poland and nowhere else in this world?

Well, if you are talking about counters then it's one of the harder ones but by no means the hardest. Try Japanese counters, the ending changes most times, e.g ippon (one bottle of beer), nihon (2 bottles), sambon (3 bottles) and yonhon (4 bottles) etc etc. Poland generally has the ów or, to a lesser extent, the ek ending for 5 upwards to 20 I think. Jedna butelka, dwie butelki and sześć butelek. Jeden widelec, dwa widelce i sześć widelców etc etc. You don't need to think about the endings all the time like in Japanese.

Mafketis wrote:


for 99% of all people who claim to speak some polish, this is exactly the case. they learn polish and disregard all declensions, proper usage of the polish numerical sytem, gender, miejscownik, which verbs require which case, etc. etc. and in the end, their Polish is crap. my first year in Poland i did nothing other than study basic words and grammar grammar grammar till I puked from grammar. in the end though, what it gave me was a grammatical basis for all new words I learned thereafter. After 3+ years in Poland, my vocab is still small but my grammar allows me to adopt new words and use them rather quickly. The hard part is mostly over and now I mainly study vocabulary for the grammar comes quite naturally now, aside from maybe counters of words I haven't heard yet.

Seanus wrote:


saying "you don't need to think about the endings all the time" and "Polish" in the same sentence is an outrage.

I don't know a lick of Japanese, but if I had to guess, I doubt that when you say "with nihon" or "on nihon", or "i don't have "nihon", it's still "nihon", every time. not the case with good ole' Polish.

2 bottles = dwie butelki
with 2 bottles = z dwoma butelkami
on 2 bottles = na dwóch butelkach
I don't have 2 bottles = Nie mam dwóch butelek

You can never take a number for granted because at any moment while in context, it can change which not only makes speaking properly difficult, but comprehension tough because you need to get used to hearing someone say the exact same damn word but in several different forms.

I'm sure you've seen the web page discussing how Polish is the hardest language in the world where the author displays the "17 ways of saying the number two" in Polish. The kicker is there are 17, not including case changes, meaning he doesn't list drugiego, drugiej, drugim, drugich, drugą, etc. etc. putting you well over twenty forms.

that is eye opening post.

How can we award the creator of this post, he really makes a great point here.

Thanks!

And how is that different from other Slavonic languages?

Hardly. It's being abused in the Western world thoroughly. If it was a real disease, why did no-one suffer from it in the 1980's?

*begins slow clap*

Just using the examples given, the difference is that in Polish there are two forms for Feminine Singular. The other is dwiema?

excellent. i stand corrected, i forgot there's a feminine forum.

i guess you further proved my point. it's THAT easy to make a grammatically incorrect sentence in Polish, especially with numbers.

It's bureaucratic disease. Some kind of fashion or fad. There were no dysortography 20 years ago. It was a trick to make better exam results (as the dyslectics or as you say dysortographers have more time to resolve tests and write essays), so some lazy or unproductive teachers can be proud of better learning effects.