Why is the Polish language so difficult?

There is a website that has automated speakers of many languages including Polish. It is a very good reference. Especially Polish, Maja has very good pronounciation. www dot ivona dot com

Thanks for the tip!

I recently read in an abstract entitled "Jeden, dwa, trzy.." from a major English news daily that Polish is quickly becoming the second most widely spoken language in England todayLOL
All the more practical reason to slog on in our struggles:-)

ok Lyzko, but the question still needs to be asked, how does it help to know Polish in England? what would the average chap do with that skill? the money's still in English.

it's like Spanish in the USA. Joe Shmoe American that speaks spanish is, for the most part, useless in the job market. why hire him to speak spanish to people when you have tens of millions of latinos that are fluent/native in spanish and basically native in english as well? it's a useless skill aside from maybe talking to latinos in your private time.

Given that Poland has 38 million people and is a rather good market to export/expand into as it's not fully developed, I'd say that Polish is a good choice to learn for the young learner.



And what about that huge non-English speaking market south of the border? Do you think they speak English at a native level? Naaah.

what market are you talking about? AK-47's and cocaine?



better than German, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese....? how many Englishmen aspire to make a living out of doing business with Poland/Poles? Just thinkin' out loud man.

Arabic? now you made me laugh

English language decline has been on the rise here in the States, EASILY at the outset for the past fifteen or so years in particular. Imagine for instance that the time-honored US-Census questions for bread-and-butter native American-born English speakers had to have certain questions revamped into a kind of Globish pablum for infants: "How many siblings do you have?" HAD TO be changed/dumbed/watered down to "How many brothers and sisters.....?", as most of those surveyed as of 2008, didn't know the meaning of "siblings"!!! In highschool SAT exams, research has found that once basic vocabulary, words specific to particular use, have gradually been eliminated in favor of more generic, less lexically "challenging" choices, such as "tressle", now replaced by "railroad bridge" etc...

English worldwide??? Now I'm laughing there, mateLOL

I really oughtn't complain, especially since whilst English is in the (terminal) process of being dumbed down even further, as we all read here on PF, Polish, along with other languages, is currently in danger of losing her diacritical marks, i.e. the stuff which makes Polish Polish, Romanian Romanian, etc. ad infinitum! Before long we'll simply have to guess as to whether someone means "część" (part, section) or "Cześć", except for obvious context clues:-) Though the latter's far from the best example, Polish, I believe, will become in the long even MORE difficult for both foreigners along with Poles, as language tries vainly to keep up with the keyboard. We're literally losing our language, one keystroke at a time lol

Laughing all the way to the bank, maybe? Arabic is HUGE here in the USA, government contracts that pay 6 figure salaries if you are American and speak fluent Arabic.

Most probably... You (the CIA) paid 10 figure sums to Bin Ladin... so 6 figure isn't so big... ;) Not many Chinese, Asians, South Americans or Europeans learning that as a second language though...
Guess what language they are learning? English is still on course to be the global language for business and science...
Yes, Polish is hard grammatically, but it's possible to gain a decent grasp of the language and to communicate effectively :)

Get out of your village sometimes and know about outside world :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_nativ e_speakers

It says that combined the numerous different dialects of Arabic come in 5th place as most numerous spoken language (even behind Hindi) ... as a second language it also lacks popularity...
Look how many schools in Poland are teaching Arabic and how many teach English, French, German, Russian and Spanish... Arabic of any 'dialect' isn't popular in any part of the world...
Keep trolling...

Arabic is very popular in central asia, eastern asia, south asia and africa and there are a huge arabic speaking population in america and europe.
I don't have to mention that Quran is in Arabic and every muslim from all over the world knows atleast how to read Quran.

getting back to the original conversation, i just don't see many people in the UK studying Polish for financial gain.

I have never studied Polish or any other language for 'financial gain'...
It's just a beautiful language and even with my limited knowledge I still feel glad that I learnt something.... I love Polish... it's given me so much :) :) :)

that's nice.

at least i tried to reel the convo back in....

Given that Poland is a heavyweight in the European Union in terms of voting strength and influence, learning Polish certainly isn't a bad idea for anyone considering a career in Brussels. Then there's the fact that speaking a language spoken by nearly 10% of the European Union, that also offers a gateway into other Slavic languages is no bad idea.

As much as you try, you're not never going to escape the fact that Poland is not some small backwater.



Unfortunately for you, it's already getting taught in high schools.

As an American-born foreigner who managed to learn Polish without losing too much sleep over it, I just feel Polish, like Poland, has been given an unusually bad rap (by among others, the Germans, first and foremost!). "Difficult"? Sure, but what language isn't in the long run? Sorry folks to keep harping on this point thread after thread post, but it really starts to grate on my nerves to hear Polish described as a language of exclusive insurmountability ^^ Once again, compare it to Navajo, deemed by linguists universally as THE most "unlearnable" language by non-native speakers owing to its almost complete lack of codification. There's also Basque, Innuit, Icelandic and any number of other majority as well as minority tongues out there which might easily give Polish a run for its money in terms of difficulty:-)

"Given that Poland is a heavyweight in the European Union in terms of voting strength and influence, learning Polish certainly isn't a bad idea for anyone considering a career in Brussels. Then there's the fact that speaking a language spoken by nearly 10% of the European Union, that also offers a gateway into other Slavic languages is no bad idea.

As much as you try, you're not never going to escape the fact that Poland is not some small backwater. "

my in-laws were just here in the USA to visit my wife and I. they layovered in Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam. you know what their biggest complaint was? nothing was in polish. the electronic ticket check in? no polish option. anything on the planes? nope. signs in the airport? nope.

i enjoy knowing an obscure language, my wife and i can talk smack in public all day long, but the fact still remains, Polish continues to be obscure and only spoken by poles and the random expat.

Your answers in this thread are just lamentable. If a Dutchman flied to Australia and he layovered, say, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw, he might have complained that nothing was in Dutch in those airports. If a Frenchman did it and he layovered Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague, he may have complained that nothing was in French in those airports. Anything on the planes? Nope. Signs in the airports? Nope. Does French continue to be obscure, albeit not only spoken by French, because of that? Of course not! Just start learning Navajo to broaden your backwater American mentality of which you are so proud of, man.

Let's be honest, if you have to learn English or Polish, the choice will be easy.
And considering how freaking hard the language is, no wonder no-one wants to learn it, except the Poles themselves and expats of course ;)
If you want a language that also 'offers a gateway to most Slavic countries', then you can go with an easier one ;)

Bad examples.......Dutch people flying anywhere even in Polish airports will see signs in English they won,t even look for signs in Dutch and won,t expect them (because English is the international language of Flight/The Sea etc) and their brains will just click into English mode, same for any French person Under 50. I don,t see Polish becoming an international language soon just because they are good at hanging onto the shirt tails of the EU and waving the silly blue flag.......more likely the young people of Poland as they come up through the ranks will see to it that English will be seen in Poland more and more on TV in adverts in signage and more.....everyday I see examples of this where the English word is used over the Polish (hard to spell or pronounce) word.....I think young people just go the easy route. Who knows even in England....English is decoming diluted.....maybe one day we will use the American 'tressle' instead of the English 'trestle' and tire instead of the true English tyre.......understanding is the key and if we understand each other no matter how we spell it, we will not resort to violence.

My examples, however, did not in the least refer to the behaviour of Dutch versus Polish people at the airports at all, but to the following statement of Fuzzie:

Indeed, I may have quoted the above sentence of his rather than the one I actually did quote. Fuzzy should have reproached his in-laws for their backwater behaviour rather than describe Polish 'to continue be an obscure language' for the mere fact that no signs in that language are displayed at international airports.

Got news for y'all. Just 'cuz Dutch people SEE English alot, doesn't always mean they UNDERSTAND what they're looking at:-)

I see what you mean Ziemowit I stand corrected and admit I misunderstood....but my wife brought up a daughter in UK and the similarity to what fuzzywickets said is that to encourage her daughter to learn Polish, she told her it would be a secret language that only they could speak and so they would be able to say things that people around them wouldn,t understand......this was almost 20 years ago of course. We use the same encouragement on a couple of village children we teach...(they are still young and their classmates do not know English very well yet)

Poland is not a small backwater - it is a big backwater :)

Warsaw's one of the most sought-after capital cities in Eastern Europe for IT jobs! Poland has long since begun to shed this "backwater" image and entered the 21st century with a vengeance. True, for her Big Brother/Bully neighbor the west, Poland remains the land of cheap labor and missing stolen cars, she's alot more than "Hollyłódź", grim factory Communist-era cities and long shop queues.

Come on, people! Let's stop the Poland bashing here on PF once and for all (self-deprecating jokes from Poles themselves notwithstanding:-))

offensive....and i don't even know what you're getting at. go figure.

Cross-cultural differences, that's all it is most likely:-)