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

Obawiam się, że nie. "Tak samo" jest używane do porównania dwóch rzeczy/zjawisk itp. opisanych przymiotnikiem lub przysłówkiem.
Przykład: Dzisiaj pogoda jest tak samo nieprzewidywalna jak wczoraj.
Today weather is as unpredictable as it was yesterday.

"Tym samym" ma dwa znaczenia. Pierwsze to po prostu "ten sam" w mianowniku:
Jacek okazał się być tym samym typem, co ukradł mi portfel tydzień temu.
Jacek turned out to be the same guy who stole my wallet a week ago.

Drugie znaczenie wyrażenia "tym samym" jest podobne do "zatem". Używa się tego wtrącenia z reguły w mniej formalnych wypowiedziach.

Jacek został zatem wybrany majtkiem roku. = Jacek został tym samym wybrany majtkiem roku.
Jacek was therefore awarded with deck-hand of the year title.

"Ten sam" i "taki sam" są z reguły równoważne, czasami jednak trzeba rozróżnić ich znaczenie. "Ten sam" ma za zadanie wskazać dokładnie jeden obiekt pojawiający się przy różnych okazjach, podczas gdy taki sam ma wskazywać identyczność różnych obiektów.

___________________________

I'm afraid that's not the case. "Tak samo" is used to compare two things/phenomena etc. desribed by an adjective or an adverb.

Przykład: Dzisiaj pogoda jest tak samo nieprzewidywalna jak wczoraj.
Today weather is as unpredictable as yesterday.

"Tym samym" has two meanings. The first one is simply "ten sam" in mianownik:
Jacek okazał się być tym samym typem, co ukradł mi portfel tydzień temu.
Jacek turned out to be the same guy who stole my wallet a week ago.

The other meaning of "tym samym" is similar to "zatem". It is used in general in less formal statements.
Jacek został zatem wybrany majtkiem roku. = Jacek został tym samym wybrany majtkiem roku.
Jacek was therefore awarded with deck-hand of the year title.

"Ten sam" and "taki sam" are typically equivalent, though sometimes you have to discern their meanings. "Ten sam" is supposed to point out the object appearing in different situations, whereas "taki sam" is supposed to to point out non-distinguishable features of different objects.

edit: haha, beaten by two minutes

But your explanation is better ;)

Thanks, I think both should be helpful. Thwough it should be narzędnik where I wrote mianownik! I can't edit anymore!

Koalu, lepiej zrozumiałem Twoje tłlumaczenie o różnicach między 'tak samo' i 'samo' po polsku niż po angielsku-:)

Dziękuję za pomoc!

Just browsing this old threads, and would like to add few thoughts.

Learning words, pronunciation and grammar of any given language is relevant for what I would call technical reasons.

What I find more important is to understand the conceptual connotations associated with the individual words and phrases within given culture.

A language as a medium of communication is an expression of mutually shared conceptual understanding in perception and in interpretation of shared reality.
It develops and evolves over time and yet at its core it preserves and expresses the unique cultural consciousness and viewpoint and mode of thinking.

Therefore your “Forest” may simply be translated in to Polish “Las”, but is “forest” in your mind same “forest” that I relate to?

In other words each word has specific meaning in each culture subject to the “cultural conceptualization” even if it may have mutually intelligible and shared general abstract concept ascribed to some shared phenomenon or event.

Without immersing yourself in that culture and its history, gentle nuances of conceptual meanings specific to that culture will always escape you, preventing true understanding or rather comprehension of the way of thinking that permeates every aspect of that culture and is expressed by in the language.

One example of top of my head is from old Scandinavian sagas: “Hildar Ting” where Hildar is the name of Valkyrie and Ting meant gathering or assembly, but together it means battle.

I say yes, Polish language is complex, but it is not the complexity of its grammar, but the complexity of the concepts imbued in each word and phrase and their conceptual application in context of situation that makes it more challenging then anything else.

Chap from Shetlands may have much easier time learning Norwegian because similar underlying patterns of perception and comprehension of the reality influencing his conscious and subconscious mode of thinking and conceptualization that survived Anglicization efforts of 17th century, or perhaps because similar enough mode of thinking has paved foundations for English language in the first place.

Back to Polish language, it is apparently the Slavic language that preserves and uses the most words and core words in the whole Slavic language group, we share according to some study 90% of words with Slovaks, 70% with Czechs, 60+% with Russians slightly more with Ukrainians, not sure about Byelorussians, and between 40and 60 % with Balkans etc. I may be off here in some respect, but in principle we can establish basic “communication” with nearly all “Slavic” peoples, 90% however cannot “as easily” do that as Poles can. One thing I have noticed that many words are the same but have different meaning and application, even if general concept is often preserved.

Anyhow language and culture is fascinating topic :>
More you relate yourself with culture easier it will be to comprehend it and then apply it.

BTW I met an Irish man who was learning language form internet (not some structured study), his wife and her family when he moved to Poland, and I was most impressed because although yes there will always be an accent and plenty of more to learn to achieve near nativity in technical sense, he had achieved comprehension of language and the culture. His vocabulary by our standards was still a bit limited, but comparing to some Polish people you may encounter his expression was clear and refined. The best non native Polish speaker I have ever encountered who I can safely say “he simply got it”

Heinrich Schliemann had great method on learning languages; he read the same book in different language to learn the language from scratch :>

Wow thats long :P

polish is I believe the hardest to learn

I don't know. I just wanted to be functional in the language--maybe fluency will come much, much later in my life (emphasis on the word "maybe.")

Norwegian was the easiest of the two other main Nordic languages to learn, Swedish and Danish (excluding of course, Icelandic, at the other end of the difficulty spectrum!), Nynorsk though, with three genders, I found harder.

None of these though would ever have prepared me for the difficulty that is Polish-:)

And to further complicate things, piwo becomes 'piwa'.

and piw

I have heard that amongst living Indo-European languages it is Lithuanian, not Polish, that is the hardest to learn owing to the sheer number of verbal conjugations that Lithuanian requires of its speakers. This is owing to he fact that, contrary to the discredited Evolutionary Theory of Language, all other living Indo-European languages have become more simple as the centuries have progressed. Lithuanian in its chilly isolated Baltic home retained the highly complicated structure that characterizes archaic Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit. Finding which language in the world is the hardest to learn is, however, in reality impossible, because difficulty in learning another language has alot to do with the learner's native tongue, and so there is really no clear way to say which language in the world is hardest to learn, because there is no universal world language that every learner of another language starts off with.

Ah but the irregular ones are a right pain to learn. Owca, owcy and owiec. Okno, okna and okien :) Plenty more where that came from.

Des Essientes, Lithuanian may indeed be the most conservative among living languages spoken in Europe, I'm not sure though if it qualifies necessarily as the most difficult-:) Sanskrit is often mentioned in connection with Lithuanian (the more morphologically challenging out of the two extant Baltic languages, the other being Latvian/Lettish) and then there's the persistent myth of both tongues, Sanskrit and Lithuanian, being somehow mutually intelligible if spoken, resp. chanted, slowly!

I've had a look at them and I must say that they do have their share of conjugational armour to penetrate. Yet, as we've seen, Lithuanian is hardly any more or less "irregular" than Polish, Icelandic, Finnish, German or Hungarian.

Have a look at this table of a few cognates:
Sanskrit sunus son - Lith. sunus;
Sanskrit viras man - Lith. vyras;
Sanskrit avis sheep - Lith. avis;
Sanskrit dhumas smoke - Lith. dumas;
Sanskrit padas sole - Lith. padas.
from: postilla.mch.mii.lt/Kalba/baltai.en.htm

But, I'm not sure that Polish is the most difficult language in the world for English speakers. I found, and still find, Finnish to be a very, very difficult language to learn. Polish is difficult, but nothing compared to Finnish.

After examining the site, Des Essientes, my conclusion is that you've fallen for the fallacy that numerous cognates constitute a mutually intelligible language! Nothing could be further from the truth. A Lithuanian peasant may well speak a vestigial dialect of PIE when speaking his or her own language, this does NOT mean however, our Lithuianian friend could go to India and start chatting up some Sanskrit speakers with conversational fluency! It merely signifies that both languages share a common affinity, word stock and structure. That's all. The same myth abounded during the 19th century when certain Ugaritic scholars maintained that contemporary Hungarian speakers could communicate with their ancestral Turkish or Siberian ancestors. It's poppycock and long since disproven-:))

I studied a fair amount of written Finnish on my own and concluded that the trickiness of Finnish lies in its use of the partitive genitive vs. the accusative in certain situations.

How could I have forgotten Welsh!!! Sasnaeg posted some of the more brutal orthographic/inflectional permutations that go on in various combinations not too long ago LOL Makes Polish "ciąć" > "tnę" stuff look almost like a snap!

I haven't fallen for anything I merely posted a table of cognates, you overly exclamatory ninny.

Piwo is the most important Polish word , so of course I learned how to say two beers-dwa piwa. And piw only comes into play after four, and by then it really doesn't matter, does it? :)

Des Essientes, I'm well aware that you meant a list of suitable cognates-:) Was merely cautioning against easy rationalizations!

[Des Essientes:] Have a look at this table of a few cognates:

Sanskrit sunus son - Lith. sunus; [Ziemowit:] Polish 'syn'
Sanskrit viras man - Lith. vyras; [Z:] Latin 'vir'
Sanskrit avis sheep - Lith. avis; [Z:] Polish 'owca'; Latin 'ovis'
Sanskrit dhumas smoke - Lith. dumas; [Z:] Polish 'dym'
Sanskrit padas sole - Lith. padas; [Z:] Polish 'stopa', but we have 'podeszwa' for describing the base of a shoe; French 'pied'.

I know Polish and yes, its not the easiest language ever...But recently i found a cool videos made by some American who speaks Polish pretty well. I liked that in some of the videos he's really pointing out some cool things about Poland. Finally someone who doesn't only critizes. He's chanel name is ryansocash. :D

2 piwa
1 piwo
5 piw

And I'm still talking about a same thing but number of it has changed :P

Thank you for the youtube link, Enya.

Scottie1113 wrote:


not really. i can think of several instances where a noun must be used in the "5 or more" form other than just plain counting.

instances like this is what makes polish people switch to english in conversation, only to find out that their english is worse than my polish, it's just that i maybe don't know how to say "5 of something" for a particular word. funny, i don't switch to Polish though when they say things like "I have been to America 3 years ago" or "I come here yesterday" or "I realized my job yesterday before 5:00" or "I'm really mad on her"....etc.

The same is true within a language though. An Englishman in and around Devon will have a different notion of what a forest is than an Alaskan. We could do the same thing with someone who grows up on the coast vs someone who grows up on the plains and their concepts of what a boat is. Or a child and an adult and their concepts of what it means to be strong. The point being is that perfect understanding short of telepathy isn't going to happen but vocabulary is the best way we have of getting there so far.

Seriously, do we really have seven genders? Who is spreading that bullshit? Since when have we more than 'maskulinum', 'femininum' and 'neuter' ? I feel ashamed for all my countrymen to brag through one another about how difficult our language is without knowing its basics.

Polish version for pseudoexperts:

Od kiedy mamy siedem rodzajow? Serio, powiedzcie mi jakie sa inne rodzaje oprocz meskiego, zenskiego i nijakiego?

Masculine animate and inanimate. But four, not seven.

I'm afraid you're wrong mate. If you want to be so precise there's three subgenders to a masculine gender. Personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine. That makes 5 genders, not 4 and surely not 7.

Even five. But not seven.

I can think of a better one :D hehe

Anyway, more to the point... I'd suggest that Sentinelese is actually the hardest language in the world to learn.

Why?

Well, there are no reference texts, for a start. And you can be killed just for trying to converse with the native speakers! lol :)