I've been learning Polish for almost a year but I'm still struggling with pronouncing the sound "y". Can anyone tell me how should I make this sound properly, for example, in which position should my lips and tongue be, at which place of my throat should I create the sound, etc.
'i' as in 'bin', 'myriad'. At final position it seems to take a bit more of a route towards 'e' as in 'me' if they are stressing it (like dzień dobryyy)
The closest you can get is the second vowel sound in "roses", in some American speakers. The best way to learn the sound is to find recordings of it being pronounced by native speakers and try to repeat. I cannot post links, but you'll find some easily if you google:
Hi everyone. This is my first time here, so apologies for not first saying a little about myself, and also if this post appears in the wrong place (no practical experience of this forum yet). But I understand where kepler is coming from, as this question is one (there are a few!) that's been bothering me since taking an interest in the language a year ago.
Oscar Swan's "Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar" says that "y" is always pronounced as in the English "bit" and gives two examples: dym and ty. Dym is fine; it's simply as in the English "dim". But "ty", on nearly all the recordings I have (YouTube and FORVO mostly) seems to have a vowel sound which is difficult to describe, as some of the other comments have suggested, but definitely different. It seems to be between an English "i" and the vowel sound in the hesitant English "er...." (obviously with no "r") but kind of dipthongised with a sort of rising intonation.
Another example would be jesteśmy: I just don't hear the "y" there as being the short "i" in English "bit".
People may feel this has already been adequately covered and I hesitated before posting, but any further thoughts would be much appreciated. Also, given the difficulty of representing Polish sounds in English, does anyone know of any standardised transliteration system? Nothing very helpful comes up in Google. Dziękuję bardzo!
Thanks Wulcan. I hope I can trust Swan on grammar, if not on pronunciation. It shows how difficult it is to convey Polish sounds. I suppose that's partly due to some variety, perhaps regional, in the way Polish people say the words. Eg. different books suggesttak should be pronounced with a short "a" ("tack"), long "a" ("tahk") or even like our "u" ("tuck"). I guess you just have to accept it.
man, what you're on about? vowel sounds are the easiest part of learning Polish, maybe apart for "y" sound. All vowel sounds in Polish are short, you can make it long if you want to emphasize it but that's up to you and "tak" is always like "tack" never like "tuck" lol
I do take your point and could have phrased it better! (Thanks for the info about making a vowel long for emphasis, which I didn't realise). Just saying that for those using books - which seem reputable - to help them, there seems so much confusion & unintended misinformation. The suggestion that "a" is pronounced like English "u" comes from the Lonely Planet phrasebook - LP are supposed to be reasonably reliable, but got that badly wrong. Without videos and audio recordings, and for people like me who don't have constant personal contact with Polish speakers, it would be impossible to get an idea of how the language sounds just from books. But of course you could say the same about any language.
The suggestion that "a" is pronounced like English "u" comes from the Lonely Planet phrasebook -
It is in Amglish (American English).Maybe the book is for American students.
and "tak" is always like "tack" never like "tuck" lol
In Amglish it is much closer to "tuck" than "tack" which in Amglish is pronounced more like "tek"."A" in Polish is pronouced like "u" in "truck" or "bus" in Amglish.I was going to say it earlier but then I noticed that you are from UK.
The confusion comes from the fact that sounds that are considered to be distinctly different by native speakers of a language are actually more similar than they realize and sometimes non-native speakers have trouble distinguishing between the nuances of accents, flexible pronunciations, and standard pronunciations.
As an American who has had some exposure to Polish, I would agree that the Polish "y" sound is like the "i" in "bit" when it's fully emphasized, but sometimes it's less emphasized and sounds like the UNACCENTED "e" in French (like in "Je"), or, as someone else mentioned, the "e" in "roses".
In fact, "roses" is probably the most similar case because sometimes people emphasize the "e" and it sounds like the "i" in "bit" and sometimes they barely pronounce it, and both ways are sometimes used with the Polish "y".
@LyliLaka I was tought that -es is pronounced as /ɪz/ thout would mean e in roses is pronounced exactly as i in bit. And I've listened to people pronouncing it in forvo.com and they pronounce it as I wrote. As to the French "je" - im surprised, because most people (but not all) in forvo pronounce it as (using Polish spelling) ży. At least it sounds so. Some of them pronounce it as (again using Polish spelling) że. But in the record at google it sounds as że.
Polish y, as was stated above, is a sound intermediate between i in English bit and e in the ending -er (without r of cource). Everyone can pronounce it as i in English bit and it will be ok.
I read on a blog that it is worth doing speech organ exercises. Apparently, it helps in the later time for better pronunciation of the Polish language.
Here is the link to the post: onlinepolishcourse.com/polish-alphabet/
There are also interesting pronunciation materials on the Online Polish Courses profile (instagram.com/online_polish_courses/). It's worth a look.
