Poles speaking English - examples

Lyzko doesn't believe in angels.

here is some cheese for you.

@Ironside, you realize you haven't one scintilla of evidence to support your specious claims.
@Alien, I certainly do believe in angels.

Do you mean to say that baboons do not eat cheese?

?? Another Polish joke which got lost in the translation from stupid into English, I see.

# You can see.
That's good, at your age you should count your blessings, hey you can even troll.

You know very well what I mean. Furthermore, eighty is not old. It's the new sixty. LOL
Thanks for the compliment. Trolling's your department too.

PiS Ex Minister Of Education committed a Twitter post which was ridiculed by readers for mistakes. Fools!!!! Does everybody have to speak and write like Shaykspeer????

Przemysław Czarnek
@CzarnekP
Dear
@elonmusk
,

right after the Auschwitz visit, we invite you to on behalf of Free Poles to Radom and Ostrołęka prisons, where Polish members of parlament are hold in captive. This is the first time since 1989 that we have political prisoners in Poland.

Let the world hear how the new government coalition is breaking the law at every step just in one month after taking the power. There is an ongoing attack on the Polish media, courts and broadly understood freedom.

Polish FM Sikorski in his famous anti Russian speech in the UN a few days ago: Not bad but he seems sort of coping, even struggling with his English occassionally. I prefer Rafał Trzaskowski who is more fluent.

It wasn't an anti-russian speech, he just told the truth.

I'd say he's more precise and less fluent as a whole.

Sikorsky certainly has higher fluency and a much greater range.

No he's very fluent. He sounds natural. Native English speakers punctuate their speech with ums and ahs all the time. It's a feature of our speech. He sounds measured and thoughtful. It's his communication style. I've also seen him being interviewed when he has to answer off the cuff and he's thoroughly proficient in the English language. I prefer his accent to Trzaskowski who is a bit Americanized for my taste.


He's not more fluent. He speaks faster, that's all.

They both have great English.

What I've noticed is that natives and non-natives have different evaluations of second language speakers.... I notice that my evaluation of second Polish language speakers is often different from that of Poles (there's overall agreement but the details differ).

in the particular case of Polish second language english speakers Poles tend to place more value on speed and number of mistakes while natives tend to value intonation and overall naturalness of expression.

I have no intention of making a detailed comparison and I've barely heard Trzaskowski's or Skikorski's English but fleeting first impressions....

Trzaskowski: he is indeed faster and he completely ignores small errors (that is actually a good thing to do). He sounds a bit more like a star student in a language class. But there's something.... unnatural in his use (or non-use) of filler words.

Sikorski is slower but more... thoughtful and he uses filler words (a necessary part of all language communication) in a much more natural way and sounds like someone who's used the language for decades to do things (which require high levels of language proficiency) in the real world but no longer pays attention to certain language class diktats....

Both men represent the country very well in English.

Worth mentioning that he went to Oxford.


That's my feeling too. Traszkowski does sound a bit languageschoolish. As if he paid attention in an FCE class and did well in the bit of the exam where they have to describe pictures.

I'm definitely impressed with his English.

To me it comes across as pretty posh, or as posh as Eastern European accents can be - while still being apparent. Very British.

He was in the Bullingdon Club.

...ooga booga? (I have no idea what that is...)

Upper class young men at Oxford who wear white tie and tails and smash up restaurants shouting "buller buller buller" while they do it. They pay for the damage afterwards. Invitation only, no more than about 20 at a time. Not well thought of.

Boris Johnson and David Cameron were both members, at least one if not both of them at the same time as him.

Can you guess what lie he told in order to be invited?

Sounds a bit like Skull and Bones at Yale...

There are definite parallels. Some differences too since most of them went to the same three or four schools and are probably distantly (or not so distantly) related anyway. Perhaps skull and bones works like that too.

As far as I know it's been going for a long time. Evelyn Waugh mentioned them indirectly in Brideshead Revisited puking up through Charles Ryder's window.

I definitely need to read more about Polish history between 1960-1981.

How was Sikorsky able to leave? I understand that afterwards, he was granted political asylum after the crackdown against Solidarity - but how did he leave in the first place?

Also, I didn't know that he's married to Anne Applebaum - a Russian hater par excellence, on the level of Masha Gessen and Garry Kasparov.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the more obvious that Sikorsky was cultivated by British intelligence from an early age.

How does a guy from Bydgoszcz, join a club whose members are almost all British aristocracy? How does he pay for that lifestyle?

Then he goes to work in the press, and the detail he chooses is... covering the Soviet war in Afghanistan?

After that, he works for the American Enterprise Institute?

This guy has a strange biography.

Yay British intelligence! Cultivating behind the Iron Curtain! Pretty stupid of the communists to let that happen (and good for Poland).

How does Poland care nothing about this?

The guy only denounced his citizenship in 2006.

Even banana republics like America, have a native-born requirement for the top jobs.

This guy may be native born, but the rest of his biography makes it clear that he has dual loyalties.

In my experience, the majority of youngish and middle-age Poles whom I've
encountered tend to attempt a solid imitation of an educated Britisher.

Those clodhopper, caricatured "Polish accent" heard among uneducated
Polish immigrants has become a thing of the past, I think. For example,
in Greenpoint Bklyn. not far from where we live in Fort Lee, NJ, one typically
hears people who speak English so influenced by their native Polish pronunciation
and sentence structure, idiom etc., it's often difficult for me to understand them.

They seem to understand my Polish better than I am to understand their English.
I only say that because whenever I respond in Polish, they in turn answer correctly in Polish as well,
giving the impression that I made myself crystal clear.

One of the best writers on r*SSia of our time.


I posed that question (and the answer is no secret at all - it's even slightly amusing) already. It's been mentioned in articles about him.


Renounced, and it's hardly rare to have more than one passport. A shame he renounced it though, however politicians' opponents often bring such things up in order to try and question someone's loyalty, even though Radek Sikorski's loyalty is not in doubt.


I'd not go that far however we do produce the overwhelming majority of English language training materials and RP is still the prestige register of the language.

British and Polish interests harmonize more often than not... unlike Polish and russian interests which are always in conflict....


Triple! Polish, British and American! (remember wifey)

So what is the answer?


A typo.

Would you be fine if the next Foreign Secretary of the UK was a person born in Guangzhou?

Can you guess?


Why not, if their loyalties weren't in doubt? After all, Henry Kissinger was born in Germany and Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia.

Not really.


Fair enough.