Hungarian I find less "involved" than its generally fearsome reputation. Unlike say, Finnish, I eventually learned from my Hungarian tutor, only about half of the twenty-odd cases in the language are actually used in daily communication. Writing of course, is always a different story entirely:-)
Polish is very register-specific, as with many languages, and therefore particular attention must always be paid to the relationship between the speaker and their interlocutor, in terms of age and social standing.
If you know someone relatively well, for instance, an "American-style 'friend' (European 'acquaintance'!), "Ty" would be generally acceptable. Otherwise, "Pan", "Pani" is the safest way to go!
Which is nothing but a major pita and a dilemma: do I know this guy well enough already to drop that "pan"? Should I ask and be refused?
To keep things simple, I go to Level 2 with "ty" from the start. Don't like it? Bye or English with yous. Your choice. One thing for sure: nobody will control my list of approved words. Especially, in "America".
I remember this painful process very well. On my first job in Poland, it was mandatory to start with "Panie Magistrze". Later, it would be "Panie Zdzislawie". Next, "Zdzislaw". After that: "Zdzisiek" I lasted only till "Panie Zdzislawie". Please, ignore my spelling if incorrect.
On the first day of my first job here, everybody was on the first name basis. From the CEO down to the janitor. And, guess what - nobody died. Not even a heart attack!
Do try harder. Anyone actually Polish wouldn't have this problem, and anyone brought up here actually speaking Polish would instinctively know the rules surrounding formal and informal language.
Native speakers acquire their mother tongue rather than learn it, so it takes quite a while to know the rules. 'Ty' vs 'Pan/Pani' or something regional dialects 'Wy' is pretty natural for us.
Such an observation says far more about your insecurities than it does about me, Rich:-) Once more, code-switching is as run of the mill for Poles as the "everybody on a first name basis" is in the US. Language acquisition remains the most "childLIKE" (as opposed to "childISH") of human pursuits, as it forces us to rethink, almost to relive, life in someone else's body, thinking, and cultural/linguistic environment.
Yes, a native speaker who hasn't used the language in a long time might hesitate in borderline cases but the basic distinction is as natural as 'the' and 'a/an' is for English speakers (which non-natives need to learn rules for, rules which don't always work).
For native speakers the language doesn't describe reality, it _is_ reality, for Rich Polish is obviously a foreign system the rules of which seem arbitrarily and needlessly complex while English is his reality. No non-native speaker attains smooth fluency without some kind of formal study as many fossilized and non-idiomatic forms clog up the flow.
Furthermore, what in English spelling/pronunciation could ever hope to prepare a Pole for orthographic nightmares such as "pflegm", "reign", and the like:-)
As any Polish speaker knows, there are reasons for those spellings. Only a person with a poor grasp of Polish, perhaps acquired through Google Translate would struggle with them.
...which among the Slavic languages has clitics (unknown in Russian or Polish!) as well as more tenses per se than in Polish, for example.
My forrays into Hungarian promptly ended when my teacher returned to Szombatvasarhely following the Covid outbreak! Compared with Polish, Hungarian has zero Slavic roots, although considerable cross-pollination of neighboring vocabulary from nearby Slavs. Polish of course has seven cases compared with the approx. fifteen or so in Hungarian:-)
Oh come on... I don't believe you. Bulgarian and Russian are closest to each other, outside of Belarusian and Ukrainian. Both are languages heavily influenced by Old Church Slavonic (which Byzantine Bulgarians invented). So I think I can judge the difficulty of the jump from Bulgarian to Polish...It's definitely nowhere close to Hungarian, which might as well be Japanese to me.
As far as reading goes, I've just trained my brain to transliterate all the Polish hissing sounds (the sczzzz, dzzzz, bzzzzz) to letters a normal human being would use, and everything becomes readable.
@Bobko, Oh, come on yourself! In terms orthographic consistency, SlovakMaster might well have you over a barrel, buster.
Polish is to be sure orthographically consistent, most of the time, yet as somebody who's also studied Hungarian, the latter has ZERO silent vowels and reveals a regularity in its consonants which beats even Polish:-)
Moreover, Hungarian's ever consistent pronunciation and regularity of intonation leaves Polish at the starting gate, I'm afraid,
Extremely Hard - Polish the hardest language to learn ...and totally useless.
I stayed in Poland for two weeks and spoke English 90% of the time. My daughter and her husband - neither one speaking Polish - spent 3 days in Warsaw without any problems.
In one generation, American will be the second official language in Poland thanks to the US troops there. That horrible British version will be nothing but history.
@Rich, while I can't substantiate your experience in Poland and would scarcely wish to claim you're not being truthful, unless you were either completely soused on bimber or were looking at pretty women's skirts (which I could well understand), I somehow can't believe that you had zero comprehension issues not speaking Polish in Poland, furthermore, that somehow American English will become the "second language" there in the future.
I somehow can't believe that you had zero comprehension issues not speaking Polish in Poland, f
I never said I had comprehension issues except once. At Gdansk RR station, she was behind the glass, spoke fast, and the noise was awful. Out of desperation. I switched to English so she would slow down and stop using the words that were new to me. Duh!
BTW, what the fvck is the matter with you and others here marveling over my language preferences...I lived in Poland for 24 years. I lived in the US for 57 years. 57>>24. English is now my primary language. Accent is a different matter. As far as ease if use...English >>>>>> Polish.
Protestations to the contrary, one's mother tongue remains one's mother tongue for the rest of one's life!
Although I've never heard you speak, based solely upon brief samples of your English posting here on the Forum, there are still clear, if isolated, examples of first language interference in the way you express yourself in English, especially when angry, which seems quite often these days:-)
Above all, you came to the States essentially as an immigrant, not a visitor, and so ridding your accent as well as trying to linguistically adapt at leisure to the cultural nuances of American English and the like, were probably the last things on your young mind.
A language is much like an iceberg. It seems normal on the surface, yet beneath the ice, there's a hard chunk below the water.
Maybe you spent hours just watching American TV for as long as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean that you absorbed the language like a native speaker. There're always bound to be gaps and holes.
Hate to burst your bubble.
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