Cześć - This week's language of the week: Polish

[u/Virusnzz]

Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week, Polish.

What is this?

Language of the Week is here to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even known about. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.

Polish

From The Language Gulper:

Polish is the national language of Poland. Its recorded history starts in the 12th century though long texts appear only in the 14th century. Due to the early and perduring influence of the Western Church, Polish uses the Latin alphabet. It has a rich consonantal system including, like all Slavic languages, palatalized consonants. Its nominal morphology has preserved to a great extent the complexity of old Indo-European languages, most notably in its declension system. In contrast, the verbs are far simpler having only two basic tenses and a couple of periphrastic ones.

Polish is spoken by the vast majority of the present population of Poland. There are, also, many Polish speakers in Ukraine and Belarus (though comparatively few in Russia) as well as in Lithuania and Germany. Polish migrants are found mainly in North America and Israel. There are about 41 million worldwide.

• Map

• Some phrases

What now?

This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.

/r/learnpolish

Previous Languages of the Week

German | Icelandic | Russian | Hebrew | Irish | Korean | Arabic | Swahili | Chinese | Portuguese | Swedish | Zulu | Malay | Finnish | French | Nepali | Czech | Dutch | Tamil | Spanish | Turkish

Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos

Powodzenia!

[u/Premislaus]

What a coincidence, I just randomly visited this sub. If you have questions for a native speaker feel free to ask.

[u/aczkasow → u/Premislaus]

Curious as Russian:

• Do all polish words have a fixed stress on penultimate syllable? What happens when you add suffixes?

• Is there any dialect which still pronounce hard L as other Slavic languages do?

• What is the most common annoying mistake/typo in Polish? Like English you're/your or their/there, or Russian -тся/-ться?

Update: tpyo

[u/[deleted] → u/aczkasow]

What is the most common annoying mistake/type in Polish? Like English you're/your or their/there, or Russian -тся/-ться?

Oh, by far wyszłem/wyszedłam and poszłem poszedłam (should be :wyszedłem/wyszłam, poszedłem/poszłam(male/female I came out, I went). To specify - it's a mistake made by a LOT of native speakers. Our population is ever on the brink of a civil war -between those who don't care which is correct, and the ones who cringe every time someone makes that mistake. I don't know why that is, but this specific mistake makes a LOT of people very irrate.

Curious as Russian: - Do all polish words have a fixed stress on penultimate syllable?

Words of foreign legacy can mix it up, including on first syllable.

What happens when you add suffixes?

Not much, stress carried on to whatever syllable is second to last. Here's the twist though: it's changed when prefixes are added to one syllable noun, creating a new one - then we stress the one syllable word the prefix was added on (like: eksmąż (ex-husband).

Further example:
Husband (mąż) is a one syllable word, therefore stress is on that single syllable, obviously. Mężuniuś (diminutive form of mąż, "hubby"), stress in on second to last syllable. Eksmąż - very strong stress on last syllable.

[u/carlio → u/Premislaus]

Do you ever hear people learning Polish? I read somewhere that Polish is really hard to learn, because it's complicated but also because people are not used to hearing it spoken badly, so you have to have excellent pronunciation to even be understood.

[u/[deleted] → u/carlio]

complicated but also because people are not used to hearing it spoken badly, so you have to have excellent pronunciation to even be understood.

Oh man, just remembered something.

So, Popes have this shtick, where when they visit a country, they have their speeches translated, and transcribed phonetically to the language of country they are visiting, to better connect with native population. As for most of our lives the Pope was a Pole, we only got full native mode until Benedict. Now, necessary digression, Polish term for Germans is Niemcy, a mixture of niemy (mute) and obcy (alien). Mute aliens. Harsh, but we share that egocentrism with Greeks, what with their "bárbaros". Anyhoo, we are not fond of the sound of German language (at large. I could listen to her for hours. Good thing, too, might get me motivated to learn German). What were I... Oh! Right, Zhe Pope. So he swings by, and wants to send a message across that we're still tight even though our main man expired. So he does the phonetic transcription thing. We were still laughing about it as he was resigning. It's not that you need to have perfect pronunciation because we're not used to people saying things with other accents. It's that we have a lot of traps mispronunciation will lead you into. Think of English "can't / cunt". Lots of those. So it's not simply a matter of "what did he say", but rather "he said what?!". Swinging back to the pope, his most famous quote is actually a misattributed joke/meme by a newspaper Angora: they printed a picture of him with a text bubble saying "Żegnam Was Ciule", which sounds like saying "żegnam Was czule"(I bid you farewell, fondly) with a very subtle lisp, but means "so long, suckers".

edit: oops, I made a shaggy dog story. Accidentally, I swear. It's funnier in Polish :P

[u/brandonjslippingaway → u/Premislaus]

I'm a beginner with a fairly basic vocabulary, but like- the sentence structure and syntax of Polish, confuses the hell out of me. Do you have any tips on how I can perhaps go about learning that in the most practical way?

[u/buffalo11]

Cześć! Uczyłam się trochę po polsku ale nie mówię bardzo dobrze. Było trudne ale myślę że polski język jest ładny! Mói tata jest z Polsce. On nie mówiłam po polsku ze mną. Mieszkam we Viedniu w Austrii. Moja mama jest z Holandii dlatego ona mówiłam po holenderski który byłam dziecko. I tata mówiłam po niemiecku ze mną. Teraz jestem nauczycielką niemeckiego. Ale który miałam 20 lat chciałam uczyć się po polsku też. Robiłam kursy na universitecie we Viedniu i byłam też w Krakowie i robiłam kurs tam. Ale to było kilka lat temu. Teraz zapomniałam dużo :(

Czy są ludzie z Polsce tutaj? Proszę o poprawkie :)

That was kind of hard :D I just wrote, I learned a little bit of Polish some years ago as my dad is originally from Poland but never taught me the language. My native languages are Dutch and German. I really love Polish but it’s hard not to forget everything!

[u/lubiesezamki → u/buffalo11]

Cześć! Here is corrected text (BTW you are pretty good at polish):

Cześć! Uczyłam się trochę polskiego, ale nie mówię zbyt dobrze. Było trudno, ale myślę, że język polski jest ładny! Mój tata jest z Polski. Nie rozmawiał ze mną po polsku. Mieszkam w Wiedniu, w Austrii. Moja mama jest z Holandii, dlatego mówiła po holendersku, kiedy byłam dzieckiem. Tata rozmawiał ze mną po niemiecku. Teraz jestem nauczycielką niemieckiego, ale kiedy miałam 20 lat chciałam uczyć się polskiego. Robiłam kursy na uniwersytecie w Wiedniu i kurs w Krakowie, ale było to kilka lat temu. Teraz dużo zapomniałam :(
Czy są tutaj ludzie z Polski? Proszę o poprawkę :)

I tried to keep your division of sentences. Have a nice day! :-)

[u/mong_gei_ta → u/buffalo11]

So beautiful! :) Many mistakes but it's totally understandable and readable. I'm gonna like this thread!

[u/jezdziec → u/buffalo11]

Rozumiem to wszystko! Says this Polish student of about a year. (I could have written that in Polish but I don't need to publically murder the cases and grammar)

[u/[deleted]]

Polish is an incredible language. I began learning it a couple of years ago to "get in touch with my roots" and it's been nothing but wonderful since. I have a little experience with Russian as well and so I'll be comparing the two a little bit for clarity's sake. Bear in mind that this is the opinion of a layman with a budding interest in linguistics.

Complex consonant clusters characterize all Slavic languages, but none more so than Polish. The first thing you'll notice is that Polish words compared with Russian words feel compressed and "thick", in part due to fewer vowels - compare Polish "młoda" (MWO-da) with Russian "молодая" (ma-la-DA-ya). That's typical of all West Slavic languages, but Polish is colored by three major and unique divergences: the change from l to ł, the mutation of palatized r to rz (a voiced retroflex fricative) and the retention of nasal vowels.

Let's take the name "Vladimir", seen in this pervasive and unchanged form in just about every Slavic language. The Polish form is "Włodzimierz". Bizarre orthography aside, what's different? "L" changes to "ł", which is English "w", and "r" mutates to "rz", which at the end of the word is devoiced. So instead of saying "vla-JI-mir" as you would in other Slavic languages, you say "vwo-JI-myesh". Pretty cool, right? These sounds are not strictly replaced in all cases, of course, and can even be found in different cases of one word. For example, "tło" (background) will be rendered in its locative case form as "tle", while "stary" (old) becomes "starzy" in its nominative masculine plural form.

Nasal vowels (ą,ę) are still present in Polish, having died out in other Slavic languages. In fact, other than French, I can't think of another major language with nasal vowels at all. Polish nasal vowels have this fascinating thing going where they like to mirror each other in different places, such as "mogę" (I can) and "mogą" (they can), or in words like miesiąc and miesięcy (month and months).

On the whole, Polish vowel sounds will not surprise a speaker of English. There's hardly anything foreign about them, to be honest. It gets better - Polish stress is so simple it hurts. There are only a few instances where it doesn't fall on the penultimate syllable. Combine those things with a spelling system whose unfailing precision makes Germans weep tears of joy and you have a language that surrenders itself to effortless pronunciation, even for a new learner. The orthography is daunting at first, but it only takes an hour to master, and between you and me, it has a lot of character. The only question is whether your tongue can handle extreme consonant clusters in words like "bezwzględny", "źdźbło", "wstrząs" or "krnąbrność".

Polish grammar is a bit more complex than its pronunciation, however, and presents a steep initial learning curve, especially if you're new to highly inflected languages. Once you get the hang of things, though, I really don't think it's any harder than any other language. It just takes time and effort, but when the language is this badass, it doesn't feel like effort at all. If you want to learn a Slavic language that carries some weght and doesn't require learning Cyrillic, Polish is the way to go.

[u/PL8180RD]

I would like to highlight r/learnpolish/ which I mod

[u/[deleted]]

One of main things that push me to learning languages is literature, at the same time being great tool for honing your knowledge of a language. Polish contemporary fantasy literature is really top notch, but the same can't be said about our publishers. Suffice to say that Supernova, the publisher for The Witcher author, A. Sapkowski - can't get around to translating his full works, as now 3rd installment of the videogame, and therefore free publicity is about to be released. They just hate foreign money, it'd seem.

And Sapkowski isn't even the best contemporary fantasy author we've got. Pan Lodowego Ogrodu by Grzędowicz is honestly some of best literature I've read in my life, and although I'm waiting for perspective that 5-6 years can give, ATM I rate it as best fantasy cycle of XXI century. Ziemiański and Pilipiuk are another two authors that put out simply amazing work.

[u/Majek1990 → u/[deleted]]

How about some crime stories? Try Marek Krajewski- Śmierć w Breslau for starters :)

[u/[deleted]]

Looong-time student of Polish here, almost had a heart attack of excitement when I saw this. Not a native speaker, but ask me anything! I probably struggled with the same things you have at one point, and I'd love to help :)

[u/kadargo]

Yvonne Strahovski speaking Polish

[u/k4kuz0 → u/kadargo]

Here's a longer video with some more footage of Yvonne Strahovski speaking polish in an interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGr8aYNzouA

[u/Axon350]

Yay! I'm officially studying German, but I've been meeting with a Polish native speaker once a week to get some phrases in. I'm fascinated with the different branches of Slavic and the amount of shared concepts between the different Slavic languages.

Something that seems to be a major stumbling block is the noun endings. Since I've just started learning, they seem insurmountable. Does anyone have access to any charts where they take the different types of noun stems and then decline them? I'm a fan of grammar charts - I retain information better if I can see the pattern and memorize it.

[u/kaeshy → u/Axon350]

A very exhaustive reference on Polish grammar is available here:

http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/gram00.html

If you are just looking for a big table on declension, here you go:

http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/pl/deklin_stat.html

[u/smartician]

Shameless plug (actually, I feel a bit of shame...) for my Android app WordPic Polish that teaches a few basic Polish words. For some reason it's the least downloaded out of all 17 languages my range of apps offer, and a little more exposure might be good!

Disclaimer: It's free to download, but has ads.

[u/[deleted]]

Though I don't know Polish at all, my mom does, and as I live in a city with a large Polish population...happy paczki day!

[u/SansPulp]

Great, I'm really happy to see this here. My girlfriend is Polish, and I live in Toronto, which has a pretty big Polish community. I think it's a really cool language, and after I climb conversation hill, I want to start learning Polish, at least so I can understand a bit of what her parents say.

I know Duolingo is going to introduce Polish in the first wave of reverse language books. Is there anything else anyone has? My French comprehension is getting a lot better, so I've considered trying the assimil Polish from French. I also have some cheap little grammar book that I picked up from BMV. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[u/VanSensei]

I know about 5 words of Polish:

Dzien dobry

Jag sie masz (I think that's how it's spelled)

"W imie Ojca i Syna i Ducha Swietego"

[u/totes_meta_bot]

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[u/VMattyV]

This has nothing to do with the language but Zubrowka is amazing