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

I respect your opinion, Paulina. I wasn't aware that I was being nasty, merely mildly sarcastic.
My apologies!

It's paltry, not paultry.

Typo!

So what you really wanted to write was 'poultry'?

I repeat my guffaw, TheOtherLOL

So do I. After his repeatedly pedantic, bombastic, insulting and stilted English insults, he has the nerve to blame his egregious :) mistake on a typo. LOL

Scottie, let me reiterate. What you all seem to call "bombastic", "pretentious" English is merely your misguided perception as a result of the watered-down excuse for 'World English' which we have today. This same language some fifty years prior, was considered literary, delightful and perhaps just a trifle highfallutin:-) The questions REALLY is, what's wrong with that? Oughtn't language challenge our sensibility and rouse us from our self-induced torpor? The answer to this blatantly rhetorical question is a resounding YES!!

Compare any YouTube program from the late Jack Paar TV talk show with Conan, Letterman or Leno and I think you have your answer.
Your generation has become so anesthetized by mediocrity that the bad sounds good, the good sounds "weird", i.e. no longer recognizable, and all that once smacked of class is denegrated.

There used to be a gentleman named Monty Woolley who was known for his supercilious, skewering, ascerbic wit. Rather than being reviled by others as an irritating, homosexual pain in the ass, it seems that people loved his skewer wit and often would skewer right back at him; it was all good, clean fun. He's been dead since 1964 and methinks to myself that we need more like him today.

O' George Carlin, where art thou?

My generation? I'm 66. You're just a little bit too pompous for my taste, but to each his own. Oh, and it was pompous 50 years ago, Jack Paar notwithstanding.

Quite right, to each his own. See? We can still be of different mindsets and yet nonetheless respect the other's point of view.

Just an aside though. Pomposity fifty years back, while still pompous, was not looked upon the way it is these days. I'm still old enough to remember how my grade school friends would interact "way back when" (he-he!!) and I honestly don't remember the sort of brain-dead junk as I hear it today among average fourteen to fifteen year olds. One must admit that standards everywhere were higher back then than now. I recall being constantly challenged by both peers and profs to get the correct word out and failing to do so usually meant merciless (if never vindictive) ridicule. But hey, we got over it, sucked it up and owned up to our inadequacies like young men and women rather than overgrown children.

Spanish I won't touch. Polish would read:

DobrY wieczór! Mam na imię Jan.(N.p. Mam na imię Bogdan ale nazywam się Lipiński) Jestem z Austrii i mieszkam we Wiedniu. Mówię po niemiecku, po angielsku, po hiszpańsku a trochę po polsku.

I must say I'm impressed by your cache of languages:-) Forgive my Polish "corrections", but as you are fond of saying "Wie du mir, so ich dir." = Tit for tat

Take it my earlier remarks concerning your English weren't misunderstood.

Good luck!
Powodzenia!
Buena suerte!
Viel Erfolg!

You could just as easily introduce yourself with "Jestem Jan." = I'm Jan. (Ich heisse Jan). "Nazywam się Jan" again would sound odd to a Pole. In this way, Polish and German differ from, say, English. In English, "Hi, my name's Mark. We understand "name" to be either the full name, the surname or just the given name. In Polish as well as German, "name" (unless specified as "first name") almost always means the last or family name.

:-)

Just to back up a ways. I certainly didn't mean to imply that "Nazywam się Jan." is in any way wrong, merely that both the latter as well as "Mam na imię Jan." is equally possible as well. Often my fingers race faster than my thoughts:-)

In another article there was written, that Polish is also that difficult because if you speak it, your pronountion must be like that of a native speaker. Otherwise Poles will not understand you becaue they rarely hear foreigners speak their language. But I recently have been to Poland (Warszawa) and they definetelly understood what I said in Polish and I am sure I don't have already a pronountion like a native speaker.

So this article was garbage too.

It is still very interesting that Polish is always on lists of the hardest languages, while Czech, which is at least as hard as Polish (or maybe even harder?) is seen there just very rarely.

All those lists are just a bs, I don't know why you even look at them instead of listening to the people who know the thing.

It is because Polish propaganda on the subject is much better than Czech propaganda is. I am sure that if only "dobrý voják Švejk" insisted on Czech being the most difficult language in the world, that language would have been commonly thought of as "the hardest".

Spot on ;-)

Exactly what do you think constitutes the greater level of difficulty in Czech, I'm curious?

The grammar, esp. verb aspects.

dspace.upce.cz/bitstream/10195/21336/1/D11784.pdf

Wow! Many, many thanks for this great link, Magdalena! I must print it out as soon as I can:-)
Hardly to nitpick, but a contrastive analysis between Czech and POLISH would have been even more useful. Don't suppose there's any shortage of eitherLOL Would appreciate a heads up on that authored in either the Czech, Polish, English or German language ^^

Will at least slog my way through the first))

Read and re-read your link, Magda! Unless I'm missing something, I still don't see how Czech grammar is "more" difficult than Polish. They're both aspectually challenging, I'll say that for them:-) Haven't as yet discovered any particularly Czech wrinkles that distinguishes it substantially from Polish.

Perhaps I'm simply slow ^^

No, you simply don't know Czech. ;-)

I'll give you an example:

In Polish, you can say e.g. "chodzić - chadzać"
In Czech, you can say "chodit - chodívat - chodívávat"

or "szczekać - poszczekiwać" while in Czech "štěkat - štěkávat - štěkávávat - poštěkávat"

This is discussed in the article I gave you the link to (in item 2.6).

And this part of Czech grammar is devilishly difficult for foreigners!

As opposed to "pisać" - "pisYWać" - "NApisać" - "POpisać" - "POpis(y)Wać"etc........ ALL meaning more or less "to write"!! Less "devilishly" difficult????!

We were discussing verb aspects, not prefixes... but in Czech you can do the same with a vengeance - psát, psávat, napsat, popsat, popsávat, dopsat, vypsat, vypisovat, rozepsat, rozepsávat, odepsat, zapsat, zapsávat... that's verb aspects PLUS verbal prefixes for you.

Do you also have forms of participles like napisawszy / zrobiwszy / zapytawszy in Czech?

Yeah, but they are perceived as archaic or "literary".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_conjugation#Transgressives

Most enlightening, Magda!
Many, many thanks, once again:-)
Have to re-read the section you highlighted.

At the beginning of this Forum it was said, that many People arguably pick up Chinese easilly and in the list where Polish was on place one, Chinese was also considered as just a "moderate difficult" language or so.

I don't no how most other people find Chinese, but a friend of mine is learning it since arround 4 years (now he is 18). He usually is very ambitious and also very good at school, but he says that in Chinese he still struggles and can just barely speak it correct (from fluency far away). The spoken language gives him more trubble than the script. It also should be noted that his teacher is a Chinese native Speaker which is usually a big advantage for learning a language, but I'm sure I speak Polish not much worse than he speaks Chinese although I'm just learning it since a bit more than a halve year.

because Polish is easier than Chinese and that's a fact

Chinese in fact is grammatically FAR easier than either Polish, English, German or French, for example! It's syntax is much as in many Western languages S.V.O. In addition, it has ZERO gender distinctions (articulate or otherwise, cf. say with German!) and no conjugation. It's storied "difficulty" lies in those literally THOUSANDS, perhaps half a MILLION, idiographs or characters which each represent a word, i.e. concept/idea and must be memorized!! The tones are as fundamental to Chinese as case endings and aspectual distinctions are to you Slavic native speakers.

To have moderately intelligent conversation in Chinese, it's necessary to commit at minimum five hundred to one thousand characters to memory and be able to summon them up at a moment's notice:-)

Still say Polish is "easier"????

Polish is classed as a medium difficult language, same as Thai, Finnish, requiring 1,100 class hours to learn double that of learning Spanish, French..
voxy.com/blog/index.php/2011/03/hardest-languages-infographic

I mentioned that about Chinese because at the beginning of this Forum it was said that many people arguably pick up Chinese quite easilly, but you can see that this definetally isn't the case for most learners.

Jan Movie, it is also said that Westerners in particular can indeed easily "pick up" various Asian languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese and conversational Korean. Surely, while this may be the case, the ability to both fluently AND functionally communicate in WRITING and READING along with merely conversing in the language is the acid test for having an accurate, usable knowledge in any language. Many people claim to "know" German, for example!. These people can converse easily enough with German native speakers etc. Writing a business letter or reading, say, >DER SPIEGEL< is usually way beyond them.

The romance languages, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian were classed as category 1 (easiest languages (570 hours)) for English Speakers by an American language Institute. Polish and all other slavic languages as well as Greek, Albanian, Lithuanian, the ugric languages, Thai, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Turkish, etc... were classed as category 2 languages (medium difficult) (1100 hours). The ugric languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian) as well as Georgian, Mongolian, Thai and Vietnamese were considered a bit harder than the rest. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic were the toughest ones according to this Institute (2200 hours).

German was somewhere between Category 1 and category 2. This surprised me, because I can't imagine that for a native English speaker Portuguese is less difficult than German. Portuguese has a very complicated tense System as well as very difficult pronountion (some say that Portuguese is even harder to pronounce than Polish). German is cramatically particulary difficult as well, but as a western Germanic language it is much closer to English than Portuguese is.

German is also the EASIEST of the extant Germanic languages, compared say, with Icelandic!!! By contrast with the seeming "regularity" of German adjective endings (whereby the nouns often remain "untouched"!), Icelandic is a nightmare:-)

English on the one hand is morphologically "simple", yet orthographically complex.

German and particularly Icelandic are exactly the opposite.

@I really should modify my remarks. Icelandic is the most intricate of the extant Germanic languages, more complicated even than German which is moreso than Dutch,, Danish, Norwegian or Swedish.

can EVERYONE keep to the topic please, we are talking about POLISH language.

Jan Movie,

Polish has a moderately consistent pronunciation, and so I'm not surprised by what you commented concerning Portuguese.
In addition, Polish is generally pronounced as it is written/spelled, therefore posing little of the orthographic challenges for, say, an English native speaker of, for instance, French:-)