POLISH 18 - 30 years old know MUCH BETTER ENGLISH language than their own native language!

This has been answered by Zetigrek; the rest of Polish people didn't bother. Are your skills in reading English so bad?

wow.

so this is a new rule for a language:

people should be able to speak in their national language
only the few words that they use daily...

Read Noam Chomsky on language. There's no 'should' involved.

Alot of nationalities like to claim better English than native language skills merely as a way of showing off, pure and simple! Throughout most of the civilized world, English "fluency" is much like a driving license, it's a passport to being part of the in crowd. People are willing to lie about it (and frequently do):-) It's really all about being 'cool' and keeping up with the Jones'.

I agree with you
Still learning a foreign language ain't that bad haha
Native English speakers just know trivial stuff,esp if they ain't educated!
People all around the world now learn English N' cuz it's really what we need.If you are a polyglot,you would be perfect for a lot of jobs,feel me?

I'd like to learn Polish though,I love to hear polish people speaking it!it seems hard but I wouldn't mind learning such a language!

I'm tired of English and Arabic and French anyway haha
Nobody should forget his own language anyway,it's part of yr culture and the entity!
Thank you for the interesting topic

In general agreement, hummingbird, however, when learning a foreign language, it's a good idea to learn it as well (as opposed to as badly) as one can.

Well,
You are damn right!

just wondering how many others super simple words, 99% of polish have no idea how to say them in their own native language :))

Oh man!
That is the same **** for everybody in every language.
I think polish people are smart enough,and if they don't know sth,it's cuz they don't pay attention or they don't wanna know it.

Does anybody agree with me?

Some people still can't understand that "language rule" means "language habit" not "language law". Collateral efect of educational process.

uh
in polish
language rules are law

not in english of course
due to the lack of a standarised english

Maybe you are one of them!who knows?

Umm... I guess they're not so bad. At least I can detect sarcasm....

Trust me little boy I lived all my life in the States!I should teach people like you English.I was teaching Polish ppl out there ESL,if you were there you would have been a student of mine haha

Fortunately, just in theory. It is a political and beaurocratic wet dream to guide or limit such a huge and long-term process like language transformations. Even in orthography.

In future we will probably say "pięcioma oczami" (like me usually) not "pięciorgiem oczu", may be also "palcyma i rencami" or "kurczak" instead of "kurczę", "prosiak" instead of "prosię", "pręcik" instead... etc. May be it is better.

I've only met 1 person who spoke English really well, but she's studying it at Uni. I'd say her Polish is a lot better.

I don't think being able to say a few things in English means they know it better than their own language.

I've met a few people who speak English very, very well indeed in Poland. I was surprised onece to speak with an elderly neighbour in her 90s. We'd only spoken in Polish before, however she surprised me by speaking faultless English with an almost perfect accent. She'd never lived in an English-speaking country either.


Agreed. It's linguistic pedantry to say that these forms of numbers cannot wither away naturally and must be learnt.

Wow, I think it's really unusual. Interwar period's education.

which means that the polish language, already chosen the hardest language in the world, will just go even more crazy and insane...

This person's the glaring exception, and NOT the rule, trust me:-)

Common the point of this thread was suppose to be a joke, of course in average a polish don't know better English then polish, what he want to say with this sentence is that polish language is quite hard and tricky some times! So it may happen that a polish with good level of English some times know better English then polish... to be honest English it's quite easy language, not so easy as esperanto, but for sure not so complex as latin language or polish... Actually I ask my girlfriend to translate this 4 sentences and it was quite hard to her to get a final answer... and I can say she is very intelligent person that study and live all her life in Poland!

I second what you said

If English is quite an "easy" language, why then is yours so poor, pedromiguelppin?? One would think that the easier the language, the better one would know it:-)

You've proven my point, that to know English not so well, is quite easy. To know it well, VERRRRRYYYY HARD indeed!

I have not lived here long enough (3 yrs almost - arrived that day of the falling Tupolev) to make a judgement on the original statement, but I have found that in Polish schools there is too much emphasis on a form of grammar that has not been in common usage since the days of Queen Victoria. Subsequently they the schools also have no time left to spend in class on conversation.....which is why I get so many people asking me to converse with them in English. In essence Polish schools try to train their children to write very well and pass writen exams, but most people who want to travel and work in English speaking countries, have more of a need to converse with people than write to them. Oh and don,t worry about the English minding people mangling their language, remember we have had since the 1950,s great influxes of people from our 'Commonwealth' all speaking English but with hugely differing accents and Patois.....we are used to having to listen to what people may be saying more carefully due to a strong accent. I hope we are more tolerant than a lot of places.

I never said my english was good!!!! Me being bad in english, prove that english it's not a easy to learn language? Do you know how many years I learn english!?

If you want stupid arguments, I can give you one... I'm 10000000% sure my english is better then your portuguese...

Nonetheless, European students/pupils of English often reveal a far deeper academic knowledge of written (as compared with spoken) English than many native English speakers:-) Their grounding in the foundations of language (not to mention almost every other subject, e.g. maths, history, science) are often quite rigorous when compared at least with the StatesLOL

The difficulties for Polish students of English arise when they are forced to reconcile "book" with idiomatic as well as colloquial language. Frequently, they have no idea of register or 'code-switching', failing to differentiate adequately between vulgar vs. formal English, for example!

Given the same lenghth of time I'd need to learn Portuguese, I must disagree with you roundly. Furthermore, if you're not going to know a language "well", why bother knowing it at all??anguage, after all, isn't a plaything, words are tools not toys and while your English may presently surpass my Portuguese, there isn't a German native speaker alive whose English can compare with my German^^

The main reason is that no one cares (95% or so) about english classes, so we are just learn enough to pass in the exams, because when people are in high school usually think what for I need english... Then when you think to change your country or keep with the studies you start to realize it would be good if you pay more attention to english classes in the pass...

I agree that is difficult to reach a very good/perfect level of english, what I want to say is that it's easy in few weeks of studding learn enough to keep a basic conversation in english. Now try this with polish, portuguese, french, italian... for not speak in reaching a medium level. In english you have very few irregular verbs that are not almost all the time the same for every person (me, you,...) in portuguese or italian you have more then 10 different verbal times, each one with completely different conjugation for each person/each verbal time, not like in english that 90% of the times you just need to use an auxiliary verb and its always the same (+/-)

True what you've said, particularly about the low numbers of people who don't even CARE about perfecting their English(:- Most regrettable. You're a perfect example of someone who claims to know English "better" than for example I might ever know your language, when in fact you're practicing English to the same extent that many on PF practice their Polish or Poles practice their English.

The most vociferous defenders of their own linguistic laziness as regards learning English anyway, are those whose English is usually the worst, I've found:-)

"English", for instance, is always written with intial caps, by the way, one of among many errors I've noted.

MarkieMark


Even Casimirus The Great would not have said it better.

One example that I always give to Poles who ask me to teach them to converse in English......."there are two English languages".....one spoken by 'the common people' and one spoken by the 'middle and upper classes', essentialy they are the same language, but the middle class would use virtually no swear words, their manners would in most cases be a world away from the manners of say a 'warehouse or factory' worker. The factory worker would in most cases have limited interests and conversation. So I tell them if you are visiting two different cousins in UK one of which is a factory worker and the other is a lawyer, be prepared what is essentially two different languages, two different sets of life skills and two completely different sets of manners and levels of cultivation. I have noted that Poles who do go to UK to work often find themselves in jobs below the station of their level of education and so they learn bad english from lower class people and come back to Poland thinking that it is common place to use swearing for emphasis every third or fourth word. It is the equivalent of learning English in America from 'White Trash' and not a good thing at all.