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michau
Tetraglot
Groupie
Norway
lang-8.com/member/49
Joined 6021 days ago
86 posts - 135 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin
Studies: Spanish, Sign Language
Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic
| Message 57 of 125 23 January 2011 at 1:56am | IP Logged |
derevon wrote:
| As for Polish pronunciation, the hardest part for me is some consonant clusters like "W Pszczynie" (fpshch). To say that without spitting somebody in the face is really hard. I also have big problems with too many consecutive "sh"-sounds, like "chcielibyście coś zjeść?", "cieszę się, że się cieszysz", and the like. |
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Tongue twisters with "sh"-sounds such as "Szedł Sasza szosą suchą" are a challenge even for native Polish speakers (if spoken quickly), so you're not alone. :)
Edited by michau on 23 January 2011 at 1:58am
1 person has voted this message useful
| Vos
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 5361 days ago
766 posts - 1020 votes
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Dutch, Polish
| Message 58 of 125 25 January 2011 at 4:42am | IP Logged |
derevon wrote:
As a Swede who has studied both Russian and Polish I would say that Polish is indeed
significantly more difficult in terms of grammar and pronunciation.
As for pronuncation:
Polish pronunciation is really predictable and easy. In theory. In practice, however, it's a real challenge as it
requires immense amounts of "tongue acrobatics" (at least for me as a Swede). Russian has its unpredictable
stress patterns, but the words are generally much easier to pronounce if you've just heard somebody say them.
In my opinion there are pretty much just two things about Polish that is "easy":
1. Almost all words have completely predictable pronunciation and stress. If you know the rules, in theory you
could read almost any text perfectly out loud without having any clue whatsoever about what you're saying.
2. Genders of nouns are almost always predictable (there's probably like 100-150 nouns in the entire language
whose gender cannot be predicted based on a few simple rules, and most of these are very rare).
That's it for "easy"...
To compare Polish and Russian grammar:
Nouns:
Polish has 7 cases, Russian 6. The vocative case (which Polish has but not Russian), though, is not really
important, and you can usually get by just fine without knowing how to use it. Polish has significantly more
complex declensions, though. Far more patterns and changes.
To make a few comparisons:
Star = gwiazda in Polish. In the locative case it's "gwieździe". Here the word changes all the way back to the
vowel, leaving only "gwi" intact. То form the locative in Russian it's usually enough just to stick an e at the end
and that's it. Other examples of transformations: świata -> świecie, mucha -> musze. Polish also has the
notorious "masculine personal plural", which can be formed in a lot of different ways. For example, "pilot" in
Polish can mean "pilot" or "remote control". Plural of "pilot" as in remote controls = "piloty". Plural of "pilot" as in
"pilot" = "piloci". How exactly the plural forms are formed is not always predictable, e.g. plural of "profesor" =
"profesorowie" and plural of "doktor" = "doktorzy".
Verbs:
Polish verbs have many more conjugation patterns, and generally change more in relation to the stem than in
Russian. Each verb also has more different forms. To sum it up, Polish verbs simply have more of everything, and
they're often harder to pronounce. Completely cosmic sounding (and looking) verbs (at least to my Swedish
ears/eyes) like "zamknęłybyście" are not infrequent.
Adjectives:
No big difference, except the masculine personal plural adjectives which have plenty of different forms. E.g.
"drogi" = "dear". "przyjaciel" = "friend". "Dear friends" = "Drodzy przyjaciele". Here "gi" becomes "dzy", and there
are plenty of different patterns here.
Numerals:
Polish numerals are a complete nightmare. For example, all these words: dwa, dwie, dwóch, dwom (dwóm),
dwoma, dwiema, dwaj, dwu, dwójka, dwójkę, dwójki, dwójce, dwójką, dwoje, dwojga, dwojgu and dwojgiem,
would all be translated simply to "two" in English. When using the numbers, you always have to take into
consideration the gender of the people you talk about. "dwaj studenci śpiewają", "dwóch studentów śpiewa",
"dwie studentki śpiewają", "dwoje studentów śpiewa" would all mean "(the) two students are singing". The first
two versions are for "male only" students, the second for "female" and the last one for students of mixed sex.
Poles themselves are even often confused about them. Ask some random Pole how to say "two violins", and you
will probably get more wrong answers than correct ones (correct should be "dwoje skrzypiec".
Pronouns:
Polish personal pronouns have a lot of different versions. Not just do they have to agree with gender, case,
number and animacy, there are also certain forms which are used after prepositions, and certain forms which are
used only after verbs.
Finally, the conditional particle "by" is harder to use in Polish as it can stick either to the verb, either be alone or it
can be attached to a conjunction.
After more than 2.5 years of living in Poland, being exposed to Polish every day at work, and after spending
thousands of hours on learning the language, I'm still not able to have a normal conversation. Understanding
what people say in Polish is very hard for me for a number of reasons, like movable stress, prepositions without
vowels and all those terrible "sch"-like sounds that makes everything very fuzzy. If somebody speaks clearly and
rather formally (without too much background noise) I can understand almost everything what a person says.
This almost never happens, though. If I hear two Poles conversing with each other during a lunch break, I would
understand maybe 15-20%.
I can, however, read a Polish newspaper and understand almost everything, although I would trade that any day
for being able to communicate at a decent level in the country where I live... |
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Dear god.
5 persons have voted this message useful
| ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5937 days ago
2150 posts - 3229 votes
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian
| Message 59 of 125 25 January 2011 at 5:26am | IP Logged |
To those who have learned Polish:
Would you recommend learning the plural form of each noun along with the singular, as is often done in German, so as to prevent surprise about irregularities like profesor/profesorowie or doktor/doktorzy later on? Or is it enough to just memorize these exceptions? And do regular consonant shifts/mutations play a role in some of these (like r --> rz, k --> c, t --> ci, g --> dz)?
I'd like to know because I'm still early enough into my studies that it wouldn't be too much of a pain to go back and add the plural forms to all of the nouns in my Anki deck, for example, but if I get much further along it will be much more difficult to do so.
Dziękuję bardzo.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6951 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 60 of 125 25 January 2011 at 6:28am | IP Logged |
I've memorized the exceptions that I've come across so far, and stuck to the general rules of plural endings. I've not seen the usefulness in treating Polish nouns like German ones because Polish seems to have patterns that are easier for me to figure out than in German (it definitely helps me for example, that I can assume that a Polish noun ending in a consonant other than ć is often masculine).
In the same way, I've just come to memorize that a masculine-looking name such as "Bydgoszcz" is feminine while a feminine-looking noun such as "kolega" is masculine but takes feminine endings in singular.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| B-Tina
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Germany
dragonsallaroun
Joined 5322 days ago
123 posts - 218 votes
Speaks: German*, English, French, Polish
| Message 61 of 125 25 January 2011 at 9:33pm | IP Logged |
ellasevia: the nominate plural has a lot of similarities with the locative singular, so that a lot of irregularities take care of themselves - once you have learned the ~ 30 different rules for locative singular, of course.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| markam91
Diglot
Newbie
Poland
Joined 4933 days ago
2 posts - 6 votes
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin
| Message 62 of 125 29 January 2011 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
I am Polish. My 4,5 year old sister can already speak fluent Polish. In fact, she could do it even when she was 3. Her vocabulary is awesome, she uses some difficult words that surprise the family. She makes some mistakes sometimes, but she is better than my Japanese friends that speak Polish almost at B1 lvl.
3 persons have voted this message useful
| derevon
Diglot
Newbie
Sweden
Joined 4850 days ago
4 posts - 21 votes
Speaks: Swedish*, English
Studies: Polish
| Message 63 of 125 30 January 2011 at 10:29pm | IP Logged |
That's the thing with Polish. You learn it as a child or not at all. ;)
Well, it's not entirely true. I have met one non-Slav who managed (1 person in 2.5 years): A French guy of Polish descent (I think it only took him 2-3 years or something like that). And I've heard there's some kind of French chef on TV who learned to speak it (although with many grammar mistakes). You really need to be the kind of person who really absorbs through listening, though, to have a chance. Most non-Poles (non-Slavs) whom I know in Poland are nowhere near conversational in Polish (including some who lived here for 5 years). Well, the good news: if you manage, you can be on TV. ;)
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Thatzright
Diglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 5467 days ago
202 posts - 311 votes
Speaks: Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian
| Message 64 of 125 30 January 2011 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
markam91 wrote:
| I am Polish. My 4,5 year old sister can already speak fluent Polish. In fact, she could do it even when she was 3. Her vocabulary is awesome, she uses some difficult words that surprise the family. She makes some mistakes sometimes, but she is better than my Japanese friends that speak Polish almost at B1 lvl. |
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Not to appear hostile or anything, but what is the point here? A native Polish person, although a child, can speak Polish better than a Japanese person? Who would have thought : D
7 persons have voted this message useful
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