Should I learn Polish or she learn English?

One reason for making small interim goals and having a way of measuring if you've achieved them. Sometimes goals should be baby steps; setting them too high (or too vague) makes them harder to achieve.


Only Polish for us since we don't speak each other's first language, and after all, we're in Poland. It works for us. Among friends only Polish except for one person with whom I mix Polish and English because she's learnt English well but doesn't have an opportunity to speak it.

Ideally, you both should learn each other's language,
at least, practice speaking the other's mother tongue.

We both understand each other's to a degree however it's worth remembering that when there are five countries, five languages involved in your life then you have to be practical, consistent and also to a degree economical. When communicating in languages that aren't your first is an everyday thing for you and sometimes challengingly annoying then you'd better to pick one and it's the one where both parties are fluent.

A common tongue, you mean. Yes, I can't disagree with that statement.
Sort of reminds me once more of that short, cute little scene in "Casablanca":

Man: And now we speak only English in America. You, treasure! Please, how
much watch?

Woman: Six watch.

Foreign Observer: I see you will both fit in perfectly in America!

In the last 40 years here, nobody said to me: What did you say? so I must know English pretty well. Did you notice that I said "well", not good?

English is King. It actually made my speech fluent. Polish is painful ... especially when contaminated with idiotic traditions like Prosze Pana or Niech Pan...I have to be paid big bucks to suffer with this crap.

Here is a short list of things I never say:

Prosze Pana
African American
Transgender woman
Democratic party
Illegal immigrant
Polish American
Peaceful looters

I will add more later...

What did you say?

GFY. That's what I said. Need a translation?

Genius forever, yo ?

Rich, as always, it's your word against that which actually happened!
Obviously there must be a rational explanation for your protracted bitterness
against Poland, and somehow, I can't believe it's because of Gomulka's politics LOL

My bitterness was 1500 zl a month with an MSEE degree in 1966 in a prison called Poland.
My happiness was 80 grand a year in today's money as my first US salary in June 1967.

No, I didn't come here to study English lit or experience the joys of voting for one of two corrupt parties. I had that back in Poland.

Yes, we know. Your communist apparatchik parents used their connections so you were allowed to leave Poland for the West. It was the privilege of people whom communists trusted. How do you feel as a former communist trustee??? :):):)

former????

How old were you though when you left Poland with your folks, Rich?

I left alone when I was 24.

Therefore old enough to have already been ingrained with the Polish language.
Tough to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, Rich. Once a Pole, always a Pole.

If I'd gone to Germany at 24, having scarcely any underpinning in German, save
for a light high school course taught by some random American, I'd barely have been
prepared for what I encountered when I arrived there at roughly 25:-)

I grew up with German, you didn't grow up with English, and therein lies the key difference!

I never denied that I was born in Poland. It says so on my US passport. So what?
How does this prevent me from preferring the US, English, and Americans?

I submit you were too old when you arrived in the States to fully adapt linguistically or culturally
to the American experience! Most people lose their foreigner accent before or up to no later than
the age of twelve.

F-bombs and Woodstock culture alone do NOT an American make (paraphrasing Mark Twain on a separate topicLOL).

Mate, you really are losing it.....Rich came to The USA in his early twenties....nearly sixty years ago....I am sure that he probably still has a very slight Polish accent(It's tough to shift!) but to say that he cannot have fully adapted culturally to the American experience is just plain idiotic!

Go to bed...... you have spouted enough rubbish for one day.

What the fvck is your point? That Americans with an accent are lesser Americans?

Learn English before claiming superiority...It should be:

Most people lose their foreign accent before...

@Rich & Milo, all I'm saying is that twenty is bloody advanced to acquire something totally new, be it
a motor skill such as driving (most here learn by seventeen tops) or certainly a new language.

Sure it's done. It's done all the time. All I'm saying is that the younger, all the better for maximum success.
You were born in London, and so your English is obviously completely native, regardless of whatever
language was spoken at home. Rich was born in Poland, didn't even attend high school in a native English-
speaking environment. Naturally there's going to be second language interference in his English that will
probably last for the rest of his life.

My own grandfather arrived in this country at around twenty-one years of age, having never learned English
until arriving at Ellis Island from Germany. He had an accent you could cut with a machete. Meanwhile, his
children, my father, came to New York at age ten or thereabouts, surely not older, and spoke, wrote, and understood
English indistinguishably from a native-born American.

My post count is over 8000. Show me one that points to Poland as my place of birth.

Hey, Lyzko, I am still waiting for the proof that your English is better than mine.

BTW, you forgot a comma after "Naturally".

Also, "My own ..." is redundant.

The one in which you showed us your ID or passport photo with Warsaw as birthplace. I admit it was an impressive act of yours but now going back on it is a bit retarded. :):):):).

Correct, Rich. You're learning!