FYI, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute estimates that it takes 1760 hours of total study for an English native speaker to reach general professional proficiency in Polish. That’s equal to 5 years of studying one hour a day.
I live in poland for 10 years now and had private lessons for 3 years 2 hours a week with homework and now can have casual conversations. It was my 5th language. That estimate is way to low. Some verbs have close to 100 forms and every form contains a lot of information regarding gender, tence, and form... its hard as hell to speak fluently as a non native speaker
speaking as a polish girl that can speak polish fluently, from a foreigners view since i was born and am being raised in america, polish is an EXTREMELY hard language. like for an person who’s language is English i guess
I have just started learning Polish. I am not daunted by the 7 noun cases. Firstly because I already speak 3 languages fluently. Appart from English, my mother tongue, I speak French and Spanish. As you say, if you are not new to learning languages it makes it a lot easier. Secondly, I learnt a LOT of Latin at school, and so the case system seems pretty natural. I'm loving the process, and looking forward to visiting Poland this Summer. BTW, your English is amazing.
6:14 - well, they were different sounds in the past, but they just merged through the times. We keep them just for ortography reasons are they are great indicators of how should a word change in different forms.
Sometimes I think it's an advantage having English as a second language, not the first one, because, at least in my country (Brazil), there's a huge pressure on people that don't know anything of English. Since I was a child, my teachers told that I need to speak English or Spanish if I wanted to get a good job. So I did it. And it helped me to gain experience in language learning, now I can use my English to learn German, and my Portuguese to learn French, for example.
Eu tbm falo inglês e espanhol (me sinto mais seguro no inglês). Polonês não é de Deus, pelo amor kkkkkk. Se eu tivesse que aprender sozinho eu perderia confiança em mim mesmo e talvez desistiria. É EXTREMAMENTE DIFÍCIL. Sem exagero.
My ancestry comes from Poland but my family never got connected with it. I want to be connected to my Poland ancestry more, so I decided to learn it. It is very very difficult haha.
Same here, my great grandparents came over on a boat but the language wasn’t passed down through the generations. I’m planning my first trip there and am hoping to at least know enough to get by by then 😆
I hadn’t even considered polish even though it’s my heritage. You just made me feel so silly. I just ordered a book. I want to give it a crack, it does sound like a language I could pick up quickly! Ty! ❤
I have Russian as a native language. All my life (!) I have been learning English, but still do not feel free in it. I'm fond of Polish for about six months. I still perceive by ear and can express my thoughts easier in English than in Polish. I’m always afraid that speaking in close Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian I simply distort, distort their beauty, therefore, even with the Slavs I prefer to explain myself in either simplified Russian or in English!
... I am more afraid of so called false friends ... say .. Polish to Russian: sklep, dworzec, zapomnieć etrc. Gets worse with Polish to Chech: example: szukać ... You realy can get into SERIOUS trouble when assuming that because something in a related language looks/sounds similar the meaning is similat too
I have definitely enjoyed learning Polish and Czech for the purpose of vocal coaching: there are a lot of Polish singers around! I learned Russian first, so that helped me find Slavic languages very easy to pronounce once adapting to the Latin script: so long as I avoid nonexistent palatalization of vowels. Linguistics classes so often use Polish as a textbook example of “fusional languages” so I figured I’d see what all the fuss is about.
I speak Spanish and Portuguese and that genre thing wasn't weird at all for me, but the declensions OH MY GOD...I haven't ever seen such things in my whole life ,in my native languages we use prepositions to mark the direct objet so I relate one thing to another and somehow it ended up being easier and it actually makes more sense. Although it's still hard 😅😅 I made the desition, after talking with some polish guys who are my new friends and now i'm curious as a child about their culture jajajaja... This is the first language that i'm trying to learn because i want to do it and not because "i have to" as it turns out i'm enjoying it a lot... 😅😅
Modern English is easy but have you studied Shakespeare? Old English would be difficult for Polish to understand... it was once a complex language but was made universal for others to understand
Dear ur father nataella coroza teacher of 7 international languages 10 years before have seen his demonstration of 7 languages russian spanish french adjoining all languages a book and that his room of books to pursue different 7 international languages dear
I definitely have found it helpful for a linguistics-oriented person like me to think of Russian is to modern English and Spanish like Polish is to Old English and Latin, in terms of holding on to so many more “vestigial” elements of the language family. Though certainly not as complex as the Lithuanian tongue in that regard...
8:16- wait, that's a thing in English? I'm a C2 level speaker of it and I never knew, wow. I just always thought that English people get the meaning from context.
'rz' is an etymological spelling. It used to be pronounced similarly to 'ř' in Czech, or the slender 'r' in Irish, but lost the rhotic element, leaving it sounding like ż. I believe the contrast still persists in some dialects, but it's no longer standard. I believe it's the same with the others: 'ó' used to be a long 'o', but that became a 'u' over time, and 'h' moved forward in the mouth to the same position as 'ch', but used to be a distinct sound like the 'h' in English.
This video is not correct. Mieszkam is not the only tense... I have lived for example is mieszkałem. There are different declinations depending on sex, tence, and forms (with something, without something) one verb can easily have over 60 different forms all containing information you would need a full sentence in english to defer the same amount of information. E.g. wygrałem means you won (in the past) and you are a male. If you are a female its wygrałam. That one written word contains all of that information meaning if you don't know the grammar it's almost impossible to follow a conversation. I know 4 languages and polish is my latest acquisition so to say. I've been living in poland for 10 years and can tell you that if you dont know any other slavic languages polish is NOT easy to learn. Or I'm just plain stupid but since I know 4 languages I'm giving myself the benefit of the doubt ;). Polish was BY FAR the hardest language to learn for me.
So, the sc in "czesc" (with accents) is not the same as the szcz in "borszcz"? And there is a dz, dz with a dot over the z, and dz with an accent over the z. Also three different but similar sounds? At least the language changes the spelling to inform people of these differences. English spelling is famously insane, like the difference between Polish and polish. I spent a lot of time in elementary school studying English spelling, and I assume Polish children spend a lot of time studying cases, both for nouns and adjectives. Every language has its easy parts and tough parts, but the easy language is the one you really want to learn. (I notice you didn't mention perfective verb aspects, or verbal participles. Okay, I'll stop now. I don't want to scare the children.)
Yes, the sz/ś/si, cz/ć/ci, ż/ź/zi, dż/dź/dzi are all different sounds, but the differences between them are at least consistent :) You take the base sound for example "s" and move the tongue tip back a little for the "sz" sound (similar but not exactly the same as "sh" in English - "sh" in English is somewhere between "sz" and "ś" in Polish), then into another position for "ś" sound, and the "si" sound is similar to "ś" but the "ee" quality of it is stretched out and it's more pronounced almost independently of the base "s" sound. Hard to explain you have to practice with recorded sounds, but when you get it for one triplet (for example sz/ś/si) you get the rule, and the other triplets change the base sound in the same way. And yes - pronunciation in Polish is very simple, it took me a few months to learn reading as a kid and then I was able to read any book correctly, because there are so few rules and they are consistent. The cases are hard, but most kids learn them intuitively, some words sound "right" together and other doesn't. By the time you're at school you mostly know which cases to use even if you don't know what their names are and what the rules are. There are some tricky ones but they are usually tricky because they are hardly ever used :) The real problem for Polish kids is spelling because there are some letters that are pronounced the same (ó/u, h/ch, ż/rz in some cases). So we have our version of spelling bee - the teacher reads a text and kids have to write it, and then the teacher checks if the correct letters were used in these tricky words. But it's never as hardcore as in English spelling :)
English is easy for a reason: it is an Anglosaxon / Norman French creol. Most of the creols are easy, since they are results of two or more groups of people with different languages trying to comunicate, the path of least resistance is to simplify the grammar and use redundancy, so the cases have to go and the subject becomes obligatory and pronouns ususally too ... Not suprisingly, moving back to the inflection etc is more difficult ... I suspect Old English may be quite a challenge for English speakers, however it may be difficult to assess it, I imagine most of the people learning Old English are those inclined to study languages so not your average foreign language learner ... Of course really old Old Polish is also not easy for Polish speakers ... but comparing to Old English there is not that much written material
It's not a creole, but it is something close: it's a _creolised_ language. This is important, because a creole is a full language descended from a pidgin and is more complicated than its ancestor, where as a creolised language takes the opposite trajectory and less complicated than its ancestor due to contact with large numbers of non-native speakers. Afrikaans went under a similar change, being a creolised form of Dutch. Neither are creoles however. The creolisation of English didn't occur with the Normans, however, but with their cousins in the Danelaw. English borrowed a lot of words from Norman French, and had an effect on how what became Middle English was spelled, but it didn't affect it otherwise. Old English isn't quite a difficult as people think it might be: if you can recognise the sound changes, you can recognise a _lot_ of vocabulary. You still have to deal with OE's more extensive case system, different pronouns, the fact that it's a V2 language, &c., but in a lot of ways it's more accessible than German.
@@talideon I am not a trained linguist and I guess this shows in the terminology lapses! :-) Thanks for the corrections! In general I think where more different people speak the language there is a pressure to simplify. Polish actually also got simpler and I believe it happenned during the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania (CLP), where it was spoken by Polish, Lithuanian and various Russian groups. While I consider myself Polish since this was the language spoken in my home, my father actually was Lithuanian, while I do not speak Lithuanian myself, from my father I am aware about the features of the Lithuanian language and it looks like it is more complex than Polish, retaining as active features which are either extinct in Polish or known but not used. These two languages belong to two distinct but close groups. However Lithuanian in CLP was only used locally and mostly by peasants, nobles and upward mobile people were using Polish and since most of them actually learned it as a 2nd language IMHO this created a pressure on the Polish language to simplify.
Yes there are, but irregular verb means something different in Polish and in English. All Polish verbs change with gender, grammatical person and tense. For example "to drink" = "pić", "I drink" = "piję", "you drink" = "pijesz", "you drank" = "piłeś/piłaś/piłoś" depending on the gender, etc. And "pić" is considered a regular verb in Polish because these changes are expected - almost all verbs change in similar way. But then you have irregular verbs like "to go" = "iść". In the present tense they are "I go" = "idę", "you go" = "idziesz", etc. But in the past tense they change to "I went" = "szłam/szedłem/szło", "you went" = "szłaś/szedłeś/szłoś", "she/he/it went" = "szła/szedł/szło", etc. So in Polish irregularity means that the whole word root changes, not that the endings change.
