How to read Polish or something 

Correction about zi (7:05): There ARE cases where it can be pronounced 'zee' instead of 'ź'. Some words that start with 'i' (e.g. ignorować - to ignore) can have a form with a 'z' attached to the front (zignorować), which changes something barely significant I'm too incompetent to explain, but will be pronounced 'zee'. Or maybe even 'z-i' (z-ignorować). Unfortunately that might be an inconsistency in pronunciation you won't be able to decipher without knowing the meaning of what you're reading. Should be rare. I think. If anyone actually knows what's up with 'zi' in more detail, feel free to reply and explain. I'm just some fucking guy.

“Unlike in English, where letters have dreams and can be whatever the hell they want” Lmfaooo I love this so much, painfully true 🥲

polish sounds like it'd be better and more consistent than english on paper but in practice it's polish

I learned to become a fluent Polish speaker by listening to “Hej, Sokoły” for about 5 hours straight and I regret nothing

From this video I understood that in english even the vowels have freedom of speech

you somehow gaslighted me into thinking that polish is a real language

"It makes sense if you don't think about it" is my favourite sentence from now on...

The Polish "rz" sound shows up in English "treasure".

The accurate roasting of English made me immediately subscribe.

It's nice to know how to pronounce different languages so that you don't butcher them even if you don't understand them.

3:10 children, touch, chop HMMMM it is all connected

The way you're attacking english is phenomenal. 😂 I'm Slovak, not Polish, but I learned to speak both english and polish fluently. And while there are some crazy things in poish language, english was waaaay more confusing when I was a child. It makes no sense. Btw thanks for making me laugh.😊

Learning simply how to pronounce words in a foreign language is very underrated. As a visitor or tourist, it can help you do things like ... pronounce something on a menu, order a pastry at a bakery with one word and a thank you, or ask for hand-gesture directions in an unfamiliar metro system or a neighborhood, by just saying the name of your destination in a questioning tone. If you add simple courtesy words like "please, thank you, help!" your interactions with locals could improve ten-fold

Fun fact - Morze może pomoże, a morze może nie pomoże, to może pomoże Pomorze, a jak Pomorze może nie pomoże, ani morze może nie pomoże, to może pomoże Gdańsk, is a completely normal sentence.

Świetny tutorial, jeszcze 11 minut temu nie wiedziałem co to Polska, teraz władam waszym językiem na poziomie C2, a w portfelu pojawił się dowód i karta do biedry

1:18 fun fact, you can learn these vowels faster by walking barefoot across a floor covered in Lego.

I recall a story of a Pole teaching English in Japan - he started his classes by teaching how to read Polish, and then used it to teach pronunciation of the actual English words. He struggled teaching English to Japanese until he came up with this method. Story from a teacher at Polish-Japanese IT school, but I don't remember if he was telling about himself or his colleague.

For anyone curious, as a native Mandarin speaker, the Chinese sentence at 0:23 reads "everyone is generously caressing the self-restraining bee" (or "self-restraining bees," since there's no distinction between singular and plural here in the Chinese) (I think this is the actual meaning of the Polish sentence too...)

I love the state of mind when you already know Polish but click on the video regardless to watch it cuz bored

This is GREAT! I'm a Ukrainian and I can guess meaning of Polish words by their sound, but not if they are written, now I have ability to read! ✊ Thank you for the video!!!

The W->F thing is called "devoicing" and it's way more common in Polish than you might realize. D can become a T and K can turn into G. The rules for this are quite complex and not worth remembering because it's extremely natural and simply comes out like that.

I once again realise that learning polish as a german is easier than through english

I'm not even gonna lie, Artur, you've convinced me to learn Polish. Wish me luck boys.

as a Russian native speaker, I always appreciate the mocking of the "r" sound in English. Thank you, fellow Slav

This was surprisingly educational. I have a Polish wife and I've been learning Polish for years from Duolingo, and yet you dropped some nuggets in this video that I have never picked up from either of those sources.

Fun fact: Polish *used to* have double 'o' in its early days for representing the long 'o' sound. Then it got shortened to 'ó', still the same purpose. Vowel shift and other language shenanigans later, it turned into a 'u' sounding letter. There's actually some recordings of older people, where you can still hear the difference between 'o', 'ó' and 'u'

My man just dropped "dżdżownica" so fucking casually in there...

Whenever we rode around Poland me and other lithuanians were thinking "how do they pronounce so many syllables?", even when read separately they start combining and it then makes sense but this video truly helped making sure of that.

It's so funny to look at this as a czech guy understanding everything before hand and just watching you try explain it to english speaking blokes :D

Fun fact - there is somewhere on the internet a cold war era map of the United Kingdom, with all the place names written using Polish rules and original English pronunciation. It was meant to be used by Polish airforce, to properly pronounce places, if they got lost there (I admire the optimism), but supposedly it's grat for English people to learn to read Polish.

I’ve no intention of learning Polish. I’ve never had any intention of learning Polish. Your video popped into my feed. I was intrigued. I loved your opening statement about your qualifications and immediately subscribed. Who knows, I might even give learning Polish a whirl, just to be chic! 😂

LOL, you unironically helped me with reading letters from my grandma. i understand polish, but reading sometimes is tough

Thank you very much for these Polish lessons, I am very grateful for this, you help a large part of people who do not speak Polish. Greetings from Sosnowiec

7:05 zignorować

For what it's worth, I think the rz in polish is similar to the j sound that the s makes in "treasure" or "pleasure" in english

This was super helpful! Made me realize pronunciation is actually a motor skill issue because (at least as a German speaker) several frikatives (cz, sz, w..) in a row or after a consonant are not a thing in most germanic languages so you straight up don't have the coordination even if the sound itself is easy.

vowels are my favorite snack, i eat them every day for breakfast

"Все щедро поглаживают сдержанных пчёл" - most sane slavic activity💀💀💀

Please make many more videos and much more often. As an English person with many polish friends, these videos are helping immensely. Plus I say to get myself out of trouble when I introduce myself as Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.

Thank you for coming back to fill me with your polish knowledge

Poland be like: and his name is Jan Price

Ironically, your videos have actually been one of the most helpful things trying to learn Polish lol.

Loved the nonexistent Sponsor of the video🙌🏻maybe its Pierogi-man😁 Got a follow from me,greetings from Switzerland ✌🏻

I love how despite being a learning Polish video, you dont miss a change to talk shit on English for it's random pronunciation, you are totally my type of teacher XD

This is great. As a Czech this improves my ability to understand polish by A LOT. Usually you can't understand written polish because of how it's written and can only understand a bit of spoken polish because Poles speak ridiculously fast but I read some of the polish comments here and understood like 70 - 80 % :) I only wish you also went through the letters that are the same in english at least briefly. I bet there are plenty of non-english viewers with imperfect english like me who would appreciate that

Alright, let me try to put my education to good use and explain (and correct) some of this stuff more like a linguist would - there's a chance some of you are also language nerds and got curious about Polish spelling and pronunciation: 1:35 Devoicing, the process through which voiced consonants (d, b, v, etc) turn voiceless (t, p, f), is actually one of the most distinct features of Polish phonology. I don't know the details, but in general, if you have a consonant cluster (a couple of consonants in a row) and at least one of the consonants is voiceless, all other become voiceless too. The same thing happens at the beginning of 'wstrzemięźliwie' - besides the «w», rz gets devoiced to sz/sh /ʃ/, which OP seems to have missed. Besides that, all voiced final consonants also get devoiced, so for example, bóg is pronounced /buk/. 2:20 the Polish «c» is an affricate, that is, 'ts' sort of 'pronounced at the same time'. The English «ch» is also an affricate - 'tsh' pronounced at the same time. 3:10 this goes for many other Polish sounds, not just cz, ch and ć. 'Softer' here means that you press your tongue flat against the palate, 'harder' means that you make your tongue more upright and touch the palate only with the very tip. (This is a gross oversimplification and may not even be fully accurate, describing this thing is a mess) 4:08 It's actually not that dumb - the same goes for u and ó. Rz and ó undergo apophony while ż and u don't. An example of apophony would be 'oo' changing into 'ee' in 'blood' and 'bleed' or 's' into 'c' in 'advise' and 'advice'. It happens a lot in Polish. That's why it's "BÓBR kurwa" and then "o ty chuju BOBRZE" - «ó» turns into «o» and «r» into «rz». This doesn't happen with «ż» and «u». It's a nightmare to learn for a Polish native speaker learning to write, but I imagine it's actually quite useful for foreigners leaning the language. 1:21 5:35 6:35 Ą and ę are a mess and I don't think I can't explain it simply. They have traditionally been described as nasal vowels, but more accurately they can be described as o /ɔ/ and e /ɛ/ followed by a homorganic nasal consonant, that is one that becomes a /m/ before b and p; /n/ before t, d, s, and other consonants made with the tip of the tongue on the front of the palate; and /ŋ/ (the English 'ng' as in 'doing') before k and g. (If you know some Japanese then yes, that's the same thing that happens with ん, more or less.) But it's even more complicated, because often that nasal sound will be an approximant, a semi-consonant like the English 'y' and 'w'. So in the case of "wstrzemięźliwy", the sound can be a /ɲ/ (doesn't exist in English, the Polish «ń», Spanish «ñ» or French/Italian «gn»), a nasalized 'y' /j̃/ or a nasalized 'w' /w̃/. At the end of words, ą becomes /ɔŋ/ ('ong') while ę loses its nasal sound and is pronounced like a regular «e». Some people insist on pronouncing it as 'eng' /ɛŋ/, but it's generally considered a hypercorrection. 5:42 that 'it should always sound the same' is actually a common misconception and a feature of speech of pretentious assholes. 6:28 «i» is actually not a vowel in this position, it's the consonant /j/, like the English «y» in 'yes' 7:08 as the OP and others pointed out, «zi» pronounced 'zee' appears when the prefixes z- and roz- are attached to verbs beginning in «i», like in 'zignorować'. I can't think of any other cases where that happens, but there may be some more. 8:24 There's no difference between them in modern Polish, but Czech and Slovak have retained this distinction 9:56 as you may have noticed, «drz» and «dż» are actually not the same, despite «rz» and «ż» being so. One of the rarest features of the Polish language is that we differentiate affricates and their respective consonant clusters. 'Drzem' is different from 'dżem' and 'trzy' is different from 'czy'. So «cz» is 'tsh' "pronounced at the same time" - an affricate, like the English 'ch'; while «tsz» is 'tsh' "pronounced one after the other", or usually more like "chsh" - a consonant cluster. While this distinction is rare in English and may not be made by some speakers at all, you may still hear a difference in how you pronounce "batch it" and "batshit". «Dż» and «drz» are the voiced equivalents of «cz» and «tsz» respectively. «Dz» and «dź» are affricates. If you're wondering why the hell I would write all that, I have a lot of homework and I needed to find some way to procrastinate. Enjoy

Brilliant humour! Loved it!❤

I dont know why youtube recommended it too me, but- someone sponsor this guy hes doing a great job

THE LEGACY OF POLISH CULTURE MUST NOT BE FORGOTTEN 🗿🗿🗿🗿, AND OUR AGENTS WILL PERPETUATE IT AMONG PEOPLE FROM ABROAD 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅. WELL DONE, AGENT HOWTOPOLISH. 🗿🗿 YOU'VE PERFORMED ADMIRABLY. 🐻🐻🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🥟🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

Fun fact about ń/ni: In polish we both have a word "Słońce" (sun) and "Słonice" (female elephants). Just like he said, the only difference in the pronounciation, is that "ni" is a little longer than "ń".

Remark about "i" (6:32): In most native varieties of English the i-vowels in "instant" and "feet" are not identical, in IPA they would usually be described as [ɪ] and [i:]. They differ both in quality and length. Many native speakers of slavic languages pronounce both as [i] (the Polish "i") like in this video, but the "i" in "instant" represents the same vowel as the "y" in "system" and the vowel in "feet" is pronounced a bit longer. The sound [ɪ] is somehow in between Polish "i" and "y" but a bit more open.

Brilliant, subscribed. I never through that Polish as a language actually existed I thought it was a joke on the English. You have made it very much simpler and I now think I may be able to learn it thank you

one thing worth mentioning: polish has this thing called final devoicing, meaning that if a word ends in a consonant, it will be read without the vocal folds vibrating. it can be most easily seen with voiced consonants that have voiceless counterparts (b-p, g-k, d-t, w-f, z-s, ż/rz-sz, ź-ś, dż-cz, dź-ć). so the word 'chleb' isn't read as 'hleb' but as 'hlep'; 'sekretarz' is read with 'sz' at the end, 'miód' with 't' etc. and if in a word, a voiced sound is next to a voiceless one, the voiced will become voiceless: wszyscy→fszyscy; podstępny →potstępny; żabka→żapka side note: if you're not sure if a consonant is voiced or not, a quick way to check is to cover your ears with your hands, or place a hand on your throat around where adam's apple is located, and say the sound. if you feel vibrations it's voiced :)

7:10 Some examples of "zee" pronunciation would be: - zignorowany - zintegrowany Etc.

It's your pronunciation system that has made us such good friends for a thousand years.

"It makes sense if you don't think about it" is my favorite thing I have heard today

Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz next C:

As someone who can read the IPA and has a decent(-ish) understanding of Polish phonology you did a surprisingly good job at explaining the sounds.

Wow this is really intricate. Good job coming up with some compelling lore for this "Polish" language.

Bardzo mi się podobało. Dobra robota. Mieszkam w Polsce 5 lata i umiem mówić po polsku. This was a hilarious way of teaching someone. And makes perfect sense. Loved it.

I've been learning Polish for 2 months now, and this channel is a blessing. Very silly and entertaining to watch. Bardzo dziękuję!

I'm really loving these "how to read keyboard smashing", please, do more!

I just discovered this channel. As a Polish speaker, this is the best shit I've seen. Shared it with everyone. Please make more!!! ❤

Love how I watched the whole video even though I already know Polish (haha świetne wideo!)

8:17 "It's exactly the same as in English, except it has two variants. [...] But honestly I can't hear the difference, so most likely neither will you." While true in Polish, in Czech language there is a difference. The "H" sound is produced in larynx with your throat vibrating when you say that sound. And "CH" is produced in your palate; your vocal chords don't vibrate when pronouncing this letter. Which means there is an audible difference between "hladit" and "chladit" or between "hodit" and "chodit" in this language. This makes me believe Polish had a similar difference, but just simplified it into a single sound over the time. I'm pretty sure it's gonna be something similar for the RZ / Ż duo, but I'd have to be a linguist to be able to explain that one. Which I am not. Either way, I'm just very glad to see another video from you. They're always a treat to watch.

Miłość nie jest nam obca Znasz zasady, znam je ja Ze wszystkich poświęceń, o których myślę Nie dostałabyś ich od innego faceta Chcę ci tylko powiedzieć, jak się czuję Chcę, abyś zrozumiała Nigdy z ciebie nie zrezygnuję Nigdy cię nie zawiodę Nigdy nie ucieknę i porzucę Nigdy nie dam ci powodu do płaczu Nigdy się nie pożegnam Nigdy cię nie okłamię i zranię Znamy się od dawna Zostałaś zraniona Ale jesteś zbyt nieśmiała żeby to przyznać Oboje wiemy co się dzieje Znamy tę grę i w nią zagramy I jeżeli zapytasz mnie co czuję Nie mów mi że tego nie widzisz Nigdy z ciebie nie zrezygnuję Nigdy cię nie zawiodę Nigdy nie ucieknę i porzucę Nigdy nie dam ci powodu do płaczu Nigdy się nie pożegnam Nigdy cię nie okłamię i zranię Nigdy z ciebie nie zrezygnuję Nigdy cię nie zawiodę Nigdy nie ucieknę i porzucę Nigdy nie dam ci powodu do płaczu Nigdy się nie pożegnam Nigdy cię nie okłamię i zranię

Currently learning Polish, and this video helped me a lot with my pronunciations!

Very useful for pronouncing Polish names at least semi-correctly. Thank you.

I feel like many people who watch your videos have no interest in learning Polish or to visit Poland any time soon (myself included). Goes to show how entertaining these videos are

i'm so glad to know i wasn't reading polish wrong this whole time!!!! I've always found it funny how people freak out looking at polish words and when I was a kid I didn't even question it... but that's just what happens when you learn the language as a wee little kid through elementarz and iconic polish short-stories and poetry. though uh, I definitely can't speak. reading and writing is the only thing I'm decent at.

Absolutely loved this rant of a lesson!

its very cool you have the confidence to make these videos without higher education. higher education is incredibly overrated and you clearly have a passion for teaching. earned my sub and respect

As a Mandarin speaker I'm surprised by how many sound I can pronounce in this crazy language, like rz is equivalent to zh (jh), ś is equivalent to x (si), ć is equivalent to q (ci) and so on. But of course the consonant clusters is basically impossible to say to me lol.

2:31 blud did us dirty 💀

Your videos are unironically awesome to watch, although polish isnt always so simple, as it takes some time to fully get... certain grammatical concepts, pronounciation (except the softening and shit) it very straight forward

Z tobą będąc Polakiem, nauczyłem się polskiego na nowo, dzięki! A bardziej na serio to te materiały serio uczą i pomimo tego, że znam polski, to dzięki temu filmowi lepiej zrozumiałem angielski- więc działa to w dwie strony :P

As someone who was present most of the time during the occupation, I can indeed confirm Polish people did eat their vowels :/

4:20 - as a child i red Tarzan as "TaŻan" - from rolling over in something. It made sense.

We have a similar thing with the “v” and “f” in Slovak, it’s called “spodobovanie”, which translates to “assimilation of voicing”, its meaning is to make speaking some words easier. For example, word “všetko” (means “everything” or “all” in Slovak), is read like “fšetko”, because the V is harder to pronounce. The “š” is just read as “sh” in English word “shell”, or “sz” in Polish as mentioned in the video. Editing the comment second time, this video is very fascinating, even for me as a Slovak. The most surprising thing for me was that you guys don’t have words with “zi”, we do say “zima” (winter) as “zeema” (but the “ee” is short, like you pronounced it in the video).

I was in contact with quite a few people from poland, chezhia and Slovakia. My observation is cyrrillic alphabet is the one for them. If I write the polish words in cyrrillic they sound so natural and easy. We can trace the roots of the problem back to 9th century AD and the failed mission to Moravia of Cyrril and Methodius. Their students were prosecuted and while fleeing, some (Kliment, Konstantin, Naum, Angelarii) were welcomed in Bulgaria and spread the glaggolic script. Then the Cyrrillic alphabet was constructed as an upgrade. Warm regards and respect from a fellow bulgarian.

大家都慷慨地抚摸着克制的蜜蜂：Everyone is generously caressing some self-restrained bees Fair to say that is a grammatically correct sentence in Chinese, even up to the usage of structural particles : )

On the 'w' changing into an 'f': What was touched upon in the video is devoicing [ubezdźwięcznienie] of voiced consonants like 'w' into 'f', 'd' into 't', 'rz' into 'sz', 'dz' into 'c'. It's pretty similar to devoicing in English - change of a voiced consonant [dźwięczna głoska] into a voiceless [bezdźwięczna] one. There's also the opposite process, which is voicing [udźwięcznienie] - 'f' into 'w' and so on. There's quite a few different types of both of those, but the good thing is that almost all of them happen naturally as you speak - it would be inconvenient or difficult in some words or combinations of words to say them perfectly as they "should" be pronunced, so they get simplified to flow more naturally. A few examples: 'grób' (grave) -> "gróp" (this and the next one are examples of the very common end-of-word devoicing), 'wąż' (snake) -> "wąsz", 'jabłko' (apple) -> "japko" (the 'ł' also gets left out, just gets in the way when speaking quickly), 'prośba' (request) -> "proźba" (a fairly common type of voicing - the 'ś' gets voiced into 'ź' in anticipation of 'b', a voiced obstruent - a sound that is produced by obstructing airflow; try saying "śb" and "źb" quickly and see which flows better and feels more connected).

Please make more videooos. This is my favorite channel on youtube KURWA!

Funilly enough, you actually thought me something useful. I am a Czech and i can kinda understand spoken Polish, but written one was really unreadable experience. This can be handy. Děkuji překrásně. (Thank you very much)

3:58 "genre" in English uses ż/rz sound

Why am I even watching this? I'm Polish. 😂 I like your sense of humour. Fajne przykłady podajesz, nie ma zadęcia jak na innych lingwistycznych kanałach. Masz talent i zadatki na dobrego nauczyciela. 💪🏻

The trilled r sound is difficult for English speaking noobs like me, but I got there by making a motor sound then changing it. Great video thanks

Gotta love this guy casually shading english pronunciation

1:27 Both u/ó and ż/rz used to have different sound. in some words you naturally pronounce them the old way Some dialects still use the old pronunciation, additionally, in Ukrainian language which have similarities with Polish these letters still have an old sound as well. Rz used to be softer than ż and ó was closer to o than u (simplified explanation) Some people decide to use the old pronunciation.

This was almost painless, really funny, made me think of ze Frank, And I probably would have learned something if I didn't know most of it already. Unfortunately the parts that I don't know yet, I still didn't learn. Apparently I have trouble with softer and harder sounds like sz /si . When I say them they both sound the same. When I hear them, they both sound the same to me. Also I have a problem with now I wish I could remember what it was... Oh right! Things like zdz. Back in the '80s before I gave up I was very proud of my ability to finally pronounce the word for book. I think I got it right. I didn't have anybody to test it out on. But it certainly was intimidating to begin with. Most of this sentence is just as intimidating honestly actually it's worse. Except for the first word which I already know. I checked to see if there was more or how often you post and I'm not convinced. It's springtime and the pollen is killing me and my schedule is off and I fell asleep somewhere between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. and didn't wake up until almost 9:00 p.m. and I'm going to be up the rest of the night so I might as well do something productive because I'll probably sleep all of tomorrow and the rest of my life is ruined. In the meantime I need to find someplace creative to share this. It really is funny. And also I belong to a group where people post Polish words and then other people complain that they should also post the pronunciation and then people come back and say If you didn't go and look it up yourself then you aren't going to learn it anyway and as I hear Polish people do, their follows 322 comments of people arguing with each other. So maybe it will be good or maybe it will be bad or maybe it won't be approved by the moderators who knows. Also I misspelled the word there. But it wasn't me. I know it's wrong. I was using voice to text. And they chose the wrong form. I'm embarrassed to think people will think I'm illiterate but it's too much work to go back and long press until I can select the entire word and fix it. So let's just assume that I know it's wrong. Do you think you might be back sooner than 3 years from now?

As polish i have to say, you have perfect clear audio ❤️

Uśmiałam się, dżizas, dobra robota!

9:01 -- minecraft old damage sound button

👏👏👏 "Truly English makes no sense and should be abolished" 10/10 x) Every one of two lines here is my favourite :D Aaaand I hoped for Monty Phyton reference and there is! Pozdrowienia ze Szczecina, chłopie 👍

Thank you, very helpful. Greetings from Lublin

Please make more of these videos they are hilarious 🤣🤣

Polish is the only language to put three consonants together to form one single sound, while French is the only language to put three vowels together for the same purpose.

When we (Poles) are watching English TV shows, the spelling contests often make raise of eyebrows eyebrows. No such thing in Polish, every word sounds exactly as it is spelled.

I've shown this vid to my French friend and he had a mental brakdown, 10/10 would show again

my man, I tried to learn something here, but I didn't... bright side, this is one of the best video I saw I long time...🎉