Ever tried Finnish? Pronunciation is one of the simplest and stable there is. But the Grammar, it takes some work. And by some, I mean it can be a beast.
@@DIYTAO Reading Finnish is for babies. But writing.. I had pretty good hang of how many aa there should be at the end of words, then i had a pause and now can't get any of them right, like if they changed the language while I was not doing it :D Finnish is cool hell
@@marikothecheetah9342 We even butcher our words so we don't take it seriously. I have alot of foreingers at my workplace and it's really fun hearing them try speaking polish.
It's a cultural thing. In Britain the most important thing is to appear polite and tactful, regardless how you really feel. That's why the British are so good at sarcasm and at obfuscating language, but also at decoding what the speaker really meant. This behaviour is also present in former British colonies to some extent. So in this case, if an English speaker pronounces a foreign word not quite perfectly, they apologise preemptively to demonstrate that it was a genuine effort to say it right and they were not trying to insult anyone.
There is a legend that somewhere in Austria two Germans are still trying to write "Brzęczyszczykiewicz" with the only reference being a Pole repeating his surname over and over to this day
On a loosely related note, I was browsing very old, low magnification, maps of Poland and they were from 1941 so German. And the place names were germanised. Some replaced with a german word (e.g. Sierpc >Schiselburg) but some were just written with german ortography. Which lead to me witnessing a "schtsch" cluster for "szcz"
@UltimatePerfection one of my best friends in school was named Grzegorz. Found out a couple of years ago that he took his live, which broke my heart 😢. I miss you Grzesiu
Actualy in 14th century Czech and Polish language were almost identical, even the writing was, but then Czech writing came thrue simplifications and we replaced some sounds like for example CZ, SZ, RZ with diacritic Č, Š, Ř. So thet´s why Bohemia in polish is Czechy and in czech language its Čechy, its almost identical pronounciation.
@@davidpelc More than twenty years ago I spoke with some guy who lived near Cieszyn (Těšín) - his grandma was still hearing the differences between h/ch and ż/rz and correcting him when he spoke incorrectly :). I am trying to learn some basic czech and hearing the differences between these letters is still a problem. But among other things probably not the worst ;-).
You did extremely well for the first time. Good job. Hilarious video, especially when he roasts English and shows how ridiculously inconsistent it is in vocalization of the letters/clusters/words. Like Ear, Bear, Beard, Pear, Hear, Heard, etc. Pretty much nonsensical to a Polish person in the early stages of learning English 🤣
You get used to it after some time. What you don't get used to is English names for cities, towns and villages - you never know whether you read them correctly. :P
English is basically two separate languages, one spoken and one written ;p that's why spelling competitions (i believe they are called spelling bees?) are popular in English speaking countries but barely make sense in Polish, because Polish people can spell a word even if they hear it for the first time. The only thing that can be problematic are pairs of letters that sound the same - u/ó, ch/h and ż/rz, but they actually make sense in flexion and there are simple rules to know which one it should be, so it's not a problem for native speakers past elementary school ;p Fun fact: they used to represent different sounds but merged into one in their basic form, but the distinction is still prevalent in other Slavic languages and looking at those different languages you can deduce the proper spelling in Polish ;p
Same in Finnish, no spelling bees. Actually it has even less exceptions. I'd say only one, letters N and G together make a unique consonant that has no one letter writing.
Funny enough it's even easier in Czech. Because your groups of letters (cz, sz, ...) were replaced in Czech few hundred years ago. We called it "spřežky", and we replaced them in a simple manner: sz=š, cz=č and so on. So we have one letter for each sound. When spelling something, for example "šiška", we just repeat the exact sound you make when saying it. Ššššš, iiiii, ššššš, kkkkk, aaaaa. 😂
As a Pole that knows a lot of Irish and Englishman that only speak English - it shows straight away that you know otger language and you are more flexible with pronunciations. Some words you nailed on the first try. Others where git or miss but would be fully understandable bu any Pole. Good job!
I don't speak Polish, I'm a stupid Hungarian, so all I can say is: Pole and Hungarian - two good friends, fighting, and drinking at the end. In Polish: Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki. The rhyming saying - which exemplifies the historical friendship between Hungarians and Poles. Nowadays, unfortunately, it is mainly Hungarian politicians who are trying to prevent this from happening, but that is another story...
It's not that hard, it just needs a different set of thinking. Since it is agglutinating, but once you accept this, and some other basic rules, it is pretty simple to learn it. :)
You're doing great! I as a Czech can understand spoken Polis a bit, because of how similar our words are, but reading it is a a brain task because you have to figure out the consonant combos :D An interesting fact for you: Czech used to look very much like Polis long time ago - we used to gave a lot of multigraphs (that's when 2 or more letters combine to a new sound). However Jan Hus (a priest who tried to reform the church (+- same ideas as Martin Luther had later on) and was burned for it) came up with diacritics (today's ´ and ˇ in Czech). Because of that we have out special "decorated" letters instead of using more consonants - cz -> č, sz -> š etc. Our teacher always told us at school "If it weren't for Mr. Hus, we'd write like the Polish do!" and all the kids would do the "scared omg" face. Otherwise, Czech has the same thing as Polish - each letter has it's one sound and that's it. I think Czech might be easier for you to learn how to read at first, because our letters will give you more hint as to how to read it. And yes, it's very confusing when you're starting to learn English (I did at the age of 9, but nowadays kids start at the age of 6 or even sooner) and for a lot of people it's hard to tell how to read some words because of how many sounds can each letter make. And then you have words like "sewing" - like are you guys kidding me? XD This video sort of sums it up nicely (warning: it's not for kids, there's a lot of swearing in it) th-cam.com/video/J6soT3dCLFc/w-d-xo.html
@@marikothecheetah9342 Oh the grammar is insane. Not for us, because we already know how to bend all the words, because we learn itfrom birth, so at school we only learn the rules on how to spell correctly (n/nn, y/i, s/z etc.). But for a foreigner it means they'd first have to learn all the noun's genders and then learn how to bend them and the patterns (there's 14 for nouns only) and simlar for adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs.
@@alkemi5522 As a foreigner learning Czech I can also tell you that "each letter has its one sound" is wrong and idk why Czechs keep telling that to everyone :D mě and mně are pronounced the same, h is pronounced differently in hele/sníh/trh, hard consonants become soft before i and ě (the t in studenty becomes ť in studenti), soft consonants become hard at the end of words (zeď is pronounced like zeť), and even the infamous ř makes 2 slightly different sounds: "It is usually voiced, [r̝], but it also has a voiceless allophone [r̝̊] occurring in the vicinity of voiceless consonants or at the end of a word. (Wikipedia)" And it's insane to me that Czechs actually hear these differences when I pronounce something slightly off... But it is much easier to read than Polish and the pronunciation rules are consistent, other than in English!
@@FlashheadX well yes, but the cases when the letters change the sound are mostly due to the ease of pronouncing (like the T in "svatba - you try to say T but it comes out as D), but learning how to spell these is tough for sure - even Czech kids truggle with that. With ě the thing is it takes the hook of the letter before it so město is phonetically written as [mňesto]. Though my guess is the worst thing to learn is the object-verb alignment as in deciding whether it's a/i/y at the end of the verb based on the object's gender.
I have never clicked so fast on any video. I am Polish living in UK for more than 10 years and it always cracks me up to the point of crying the first reactions atpolish alphabet ;-) Trust me it is not easy even for Poles😀 The first sentence at 2:00 means: '' Everyone generously pets abstemious bees''. Could not forget about the most epic polish tongue-twister : "W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie" (In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed) ;-)
I worked and had many Polish friends 20 years ago and I tried my best with the language but just couldn't,I'm not the greatest with languages anyway. I do remember looking up, what are some of the most difficult languages in the world to learn and at number 7 was Polish 😮
People say portuguese sounds like Russian or Polish but OH MY EFING GOD!!!! as a portuguese I feel kind of honoured that someone thinks my simple language is anything even close to Polish 🤣🤣🤣
Langfocus made a FANTASTIC video on why Portugues and Russian and Polish may sound similar to even natives' ears :) th-cam.com/video/Pik2R46xobA/w-d-xo.html
Hooray! So I'm not alone. And I thought it was just my impression that Portuguese is similar to Slavic languages Once in a hostel I met a group of people who I initially thought were Brazilians. It turned out they were from Slovenia.🙂
2:08 This isn't a regular Polish sentence. It's a sentence created just to showcase these words and how ridiculous it might look to a foreigner who doesn't speak the language; it's a nonsense sentence, a tongue twister. It literally means: "Everyone generously pets the abstemious bees." BS Same as: Zażółć gęślą jaźń - Yellow the ego with a goose's wing. or: Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami - A table with broken legs. Here an example of normal polish sentence: Zwykłe zdanie wygląda następUjąco: Te przykłady podane powyżej to zwykłe łamańce językowe. Which translates to: A regular sentence looks as follows: The examples provided above are ordinary tongue twisters. soł dys ys hał yt ys in polisz lengłydż - so this is how it is in polish language xD
I think “everyone pets the restrained bees” is a perfectly good sentence, and I’m going to try and drop it into a conversation every chance I get, whilst trying to pass it off as a Confucius quote 😊
Hello from Lithuania! Facial expression when you try to listen in to Wszyscy in detail - priceless! Half of my family is polish - i can barely say a word or two, it's just as hard to speak as it sounds :D
I am native speaker of slovak language. Arguably closest to polish with czech. I do understand polish quite easy. But boy, o boy, when is it written- that is another chalenge. But I found a way. Just reading aloud and focusing on sounds, instead of letters. But beeing speaker of another language like english and get polish writing right is something which deserves respect. Its just unecessary complicated.
You're not the first person in the net who watch this video and is amused by the content and at the same time terrified by the complexity of the Polish language. Is not that bad as it seems to be. Even if you have no connection to the Polish you can easily learn the basic and most used phrases. The steep stairs begin when you start getting acquainted with Polish grammar. It has many rules, exception to the rules, and finally - exceptions from the exceptions. But don't worry. If you can utter a basic sentence in Polish, even in the unorthodox way, everybody would praise and applaud your effort. There are some channels on YT made by the citizens of USA and subjects of King Charles who live in Poland and they speak Polish incredibly well. and they started from not even a scratch... All the best mate :)
I remember once somebody pointed out that every "c" in "Pacific Ocean" is read differently and I can't stop thinking about it. That is so odd xD Anyway, as a Polish native I think you did amazing. There was a one off word or something but it still was a very good try. :) Keep going! Btw wanna know what that sentence meant? XD "Everyone is generously petting restrained (or abstinent) bees".
the Z after consonant behaves the same as czech háček, so it only looks so different at the start..we had those untill 13/14century, zprzeszky it was called I believe🙋🇨🇿
Fun fact - almost no kids in Poland like Polish (literature) lessons at school. Grammar is absolute hell and they will torture you with it for years :P Btw this is also the reason why Polish people really appreciate it when foreigners at least try to learn some super basic Polish or even just some words for exchanging pleasantries. We know that its really hard (we went thru it and its hard even for who grew up with the language).
I absolutely love your attitude and as far I can judge as a Slovak native speaker, you did a decent job. The original video is amazing- dude is a brilliant educator and hilarious guy.
About the W/F: What happens there is something we call "ubezdźwięcznienie", or "deresonification". It's a type of phonetic simplification. Basically, the way I learned it at school, all sounds are divided into sonorants and obstruents, with the difference being whether your vocal cords vibrate or not. A lot of sounds in Polish make Sonorant/Obstruent pairs: G/K, B/P, W/F etc. I am not sure about the specifics, as it's been almost 20 years since I graduated from high school, but a rule of thumb is that, if a sonorant (W, B, G, RZ) is located next to an obstruent (T, P, K, F), it loses its resonance, and becomes its obstruent counterpart (W->F, B->P, G->K, RZ->SZ). In the example he's given, WSZYSCY, [W] would normally be pronounced like [V] in VERY, but because [SZ] (SH) is right next to it, it would take you a lot of effort to actually pronounce [V] and then switch to [SH], so instead it is easier to just pronounce [W] as [F]. Same thing happens in WSTRZEMIĘŹLIWE - what he _doesn't_ point out, is that [RZ] also changes into [SZ], due to the [T] located right before it. So _technically_ it is pronounced as FSTSZEMIĘŹLIWE, not WSTRZEMIĘŹLIWE.
In Polish the pronunciation is not intimidating, the grammar is. Most of the words can have multiple endings which adjust it's meaning. Exec opposition of English, where grammar is easy and consistent but pronunciation has no sense.
When I was growing up, the Poles got a lot of stick in Europe, very unfairly. There were lots of Polish kids at local schools (following WWII), all with seemingly unpronouncable names. One kid my age smiled and told me, "How can you say our names are strange when you have local boys here named Wmffre, Ieuan, Llýr, and Bendigeudfran?" We were Welsh, of course! 😅
The first "wszyscy" was really good - everyone would understand what you mean, no problem. Cheapeau Bas! Also: I wouldn't put my faith in most of Poles to read this sentence flawlessly in the first try, so certainly don't sweat it - 99% of everyday sentences don't have that concentration of these difficult sounds in one place :) Thanks for the video - it was awesome!
All the "sz", "cz", "rz" etc. are digraphs - basically a combo of 2 letters representing one sound. Polish is actually really consistent. Once you figure out how to pronounce each letter or each digraph you can read everything quite easily. It's the grammar that is a bit more complicated because we have the dreaded declension. We have 7 cases and we conjugate everything unlike e.g. in French where you only do verbs. And trust me, it's not easy even for native speakers. I admit I love my mother tongue because it equipped me to learn so many more just by the virtue of being insane with its sounds combos lol Now for a crazy written =/= spoken language you should take a look at Gaeilge (Irish).
I lived in the uk from 0,5 year old up to 10 years old. So english is my first language and when i lived in poland FROM 10-20 years old it took me about 1 year to get used to polish reading but grammar... to this day i am still learning i feel like its so complicated for no reason and i just personally will always prefer english. P.s. you did an incredible job honestly for an english speaking person
Also, if you want to train your pronunciation: _Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzeszynie, strząsa skrzydła z dżdżu, a trzmiel w puszczy tuż przy Pszczynie straszny wszczyna szum. Mąż gżegżółki w chaszczach trzeszczy, w krzakach drzemie kszyk, a w Trzemesznie straszy jeszcze wytrzeszcz oczu strzyg._ _A beetle is crying in reeds near Szczebrzeszyn, shaking rain off from his wings, and in the wilderness next to Pszczyna, a bumblebee is raising an awful ruckus. Coockoo's husband is trashing in the thicket, a snipe is napping in the bushes, and in addition, a striga's eyes' stare is haunting in Trzemeszno._ Good luck :)
Really well done for a first try! You did better than most Polish children when they start speaking the language. Kids usually simplify some of the more difficult pronunciations. So if you don't get it 100 % no one will be annoyed, it actually sounds cute. 😊
As a student of English (bachelor) we are taught there are two variants Rhotic and non-Rhotic. Unfortunately we focus mostly on Modern Received Pronunciation which is non-rhotic but we discuss other variants. The most surprising for me was African American Vernacular English
So, I'm a Russian, and I'm also seeing this beautiful "How to read Polish or something" video for the second time. And you know what? I still can't read this sentence 😀 Even though it is definitely easier for me to understand and pronounce the sounds than it is for you. So that will take some time and effort, but don't get discouraged! P.S. Cyrillic alphabet is quite similar to Polish from the sounds perspective (not completely the same, but not that different), the letters are just written differently.
Being Niemcy, that was very interesting. Will have to rewtach that on my own time a few times. @Ian: Concerning English, probably the best kinown example is that you can pronounce "ghoti" as "fish" - gh as in "enough", o as in "women", ti as in "nation"
12 วันที่ผ่านมา +3
nice i enjoyed the video about my northern brothers :)
I like the "ough" combination in English when there is talk about confusing words and pronunciation. I remember from doing Japanese in school, there are a few phrases like using "ka" at the end to make it a question, "desu" (say as Dess) to end a sentence, and deshita (Deshta) to imply past tense, or some variant.
I wish you luck in your language learning journey! It may not be a hobby for everyone since it takes lot of effort, but it is definitely a rewarding process that will, maybe surprisingly, help you think in a brand new way in your own head. And through learning a new language you will learn things about your own you didn't even realize that you knew before. It's truly amazing and if you really get into it, i have 2 major advices: 1 - don't use the duolingo as your main learning source. It's a vocab practice at best and entirely useless at worst. You need some other source that provides an actual explanation, ideally a language speaker who you can ask questions and get answers from 2 - practice every day. Even if it's just something small like making a habit of writing a shopping list in polish and reading it aloud as you read it to get used to the sound and to practice vocabulary. Little effort put into this consistently every day goes a long way
True, but certainly not for sounds and evocation, but for grammar. Sound reading though is fun, and I must say this man managed to actually provide a good base for being able to read.
Nah, Polish looks scary because sometimes we combine a lot of digraphs together (like sz, rz or dż). The grammar might be somewhat complicated (because of 7 grammatical cases and 3 grammatical genders), but at least we don't have 15 or 18 cases like Finnish or Hungarian ;D
I always though Romanian pronunciation is hard for a foreigner, but after hearing how Polish sounds, it's on another level lol... I couldn't read a single word of what he presented :))
The guy in this video is brilliant, the way he shows the difference between pronunciation and spelling deserves a medal. Your face when he read it in one breath after explaining all the letters was priceless. greetings from Poland It's true that in Chicago there are a lot of Poles living there since the war, and even earlier, they have their own companies, they do business. That's probably why Trump wants to start the immigration purge there. Because he couldn't cope with wszyscy szczodrze głaszczą wstrzemięźliwie pszczoły 🤣😂🤣
How excited you were in this video and how much you smiled and laughed just shows how wrong the school system is. This is how things should be like. Learning shouldn't be a torture
The Pole reading the text does not submit individual letters creating a word, but all they need to do is look at the word and knows its meaning another matter as he writes. Polish has about 40,000 words of words, one word can be caused by accident (7 cases!) Other varieties, times have 40 characters.
Well these are tongue twisters for ourselves aswell. 😅 In normal daily use its far from that kind of taxing spelling. Polish unlike english still has spelling and pronounciaion the same, when dosens of words can have same pronohnviation whith different spelling, polish almost has none of that, so letters always mean the same sound.
One trick missing in the video: try splitting the words into syllables and pronouncing them individually. wszy-scy szczo-drze gła-szczą wstrze-mię-źli-we pszczo-ły. Should be much easier.
I saw few videos of people watching this and I think you pronounced the words best out of those I saw. Edit: 17:53 that is a thing in early primary school level english books, to help children with understanding how to pronaunce stuff. So for example you would have a page with columns that looks like this: Polish. English. Pronauciation. Co? What? Łot? Co jesz? What are you eating? Łot ar ju iting? I don't know if they still do that, but I remember it being a thing in like 2013 or something.
I would like to give you a tip Whenever you’re learning how to pronounce things, try to do it over and over again, even when repeats each syllable, not just once at the end and especially NOT fast I know it’s tempting to want to be able to say the end product word at the speed it’s supposed to be said, but if you do it in slowmotion your brain will process the sounds organically and more easily
if you want to get confused look up vid "How English sounds to non-English speakers" - It's amazing how they manged to sound like legit english while making absolutely no sense
With u and ó ch and h and rz and ż it's good to remember that historically they DID sound different but this difference has been eradicated and is only reflected in spelling. like in English -ious words will be either of French or Latin origin. When it comes to pronunciation the voiced consonants are devoiced in speech, so w-f, d-t, b-p, especially in the final position or if followed by voiceless consonant (w followed by s in wszyscy). W will remain w when in front of a vowel, like in woda (water). When learning Polish it's good to learn syllabisation, i.e. dividing words into syllables, as they will tell you when to cluster letters together and when not. so in wszyscy we have two syllables: wszys-cy. Words with double consonants like: lekko, miękko, lotto, have a glottal stop between them (English has it in: light (on)) and they are separated in syllables: lek-ko. There's a lot of rules and exceptions to the rules but I wouldn't worry too much, your average Polish person speaks very ungrammatically and pronounces words very incorrectly :P Also, the sentence in the video is a tongue twister, we don't usually speak like that and I have yet to see somebody using wstrzemięźliwie on a daily basis :D Also, Polish children spend a lot of time learning the correct pronunciation, when they are little, because even for natives all that rustle sound can be difficult, so don't worry, if you find it difficult - natives have the same problem.
7:14 In Serbian we similarly have a harder and softer version of the 'ch' sound (written Ч for the harder and Ћ for the softer), except they are much more strictly different than in Polish. Saying ch like in cheese is pretty much saying both Ч and Ћ together-too soft for one and not soft enough for the other.
The way you said 'Kraków' is similar to how it would be spoken in English ('Krakov'). Basically, you read the "ó" (as you would read "oo" in "moon") as "o" (as you would read "o" in "sock").
I'm so happy that my Thai nieces can speak English. Thai is with a lot of tonal variances. The same word can mean something totally different in a higher or lower tone plus they have different words for when you are a girl talking to a girl or when you are a man talking to girl enz... I tried to learn it once, and I immediately gave up. Too difficult. I do want to learn Polish for my brother's children. Luckily, he's learning them Dutch too. So his children will be learning 3 languages since they are born: Dutch, Polish and English.
In polish there are also variations for the femine/masculine words. For eg. "White": She is biała, he is biały, they (men) are biali, they (women) are białe. There is also difference in tone, depends on the tone you can ask the question or announce it, for eg. Are we going there?/we are going there = idziemy tam? Idziemy tam. Some people also think poles are rude when they say for eg. "give me that", but in polish if You use this command with nice tone, it is normal.
@@Karolina-ge6hr yeah, i noticed some of them, but they seem logical. when you talk about woman, you use the -a. is it an man it is -i or -y. We have male and woman words too, but not that logical, with "de" and "het" before the word in Dutch.
"życie żona zeżarła" and "rząd zarzut korzyść": "wife ate life" and "government, accusation, profit" - somehow ads hilarity to the whole proceedings :D
Man love your videos. I can recommend trying some tonguetwisters 🤣 like if you think polish is hard try Islandic 👀 i mean it almost sounds like spell 😂
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz looks and listens If you learn Interslavic, you have a good chance of being understood in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
your last attempt in "szczodrze" sounded really good compared to rest, but you already given up my guy hah. you already sounded like slav trying to speak polish lol. nice vid.
Reading is the easiest thing in Polish. Writing is considerably harder due to orthography - there are rules when to write u/ó, ż/rz, h/ch etc. but also there are many exceptions to these rules. But for foreigners the real fun begins when it's time to create their own sentences - that's when they run into insane number of possible word endings.
reading aloud and saying stuff in polish (even) without understanding is actually quite easy. understanding polish words is not as difficult as people think either. but it gets ridiculously hard when it comes to trying to process and understand spoken sentences.
You know, learning languages is useful for many reasons. One of them is that it gives brain more tools, more patterns to use. It is often cited that when speaking or writing in another language the way you express your personality will change. You can think of it as sort of light case of split personality, you will be still you but - you might be nicer or more mean, more playful or more serious on average. So it has impact on behavior, it's like your perspective is changed ever so slightly on everything, things seem more or less important in particular language. Once you can form thoughts in another language you can sort of hack yourself to switch these modes without having to actually speak the language. To me, if I think in Polish about "pieniądze" (means money) it seems more important than if I switch to thinking in english, money just doesn't seem to strike same pathways in my brain, it seems less relevant. So on me the effect is that while in "english" mode I'd be more likely to spend and be generous with cash. While I'm normally pinching every penny. There is dissociation, but some other things might be more relevant - if you like the word in foreign language and make some associations with it - it can be more relevant than same thing in your native language. So learning at least like one foreign language is very important, just for self-development. Just for that perspective it can provide. Even if you end up not really use that language in your daily life, is important that you have ability form thoughts in it. Sadly a lot of people just learn how to replicate language, how to simply use it to communicate but don't really make any effort to sort of integrate it internally - you can recognize that if you see people speaking in very fragmented manner, where they need to take a long time between words or phrases to replicate them inside their head, how these phrases are meant to sound. I think it's kinda dumb for them to say that they know the language if they just replicate words and structures. I see a lot of people like that in Poland, claiming to know english only to produce atrocious replicas of sentences and phrases they've learned, without any real flexibility just butchering the language stuttering out word after word in annoying mess.
"central European"- you just earned +1000 respect from the Poles 😂
+15 social credit
Yeah, nice save :)
Nah, its one of those EASTERN countries.
Poland has always been East Europe.
Polish is a Slavic language that had its origins in eastern Europe tho.... geographically we are central but linguisticly we are eastern
Polish pronunciation is easy. Polish grammar is a much deeper hell.
Polish grammar is a bottom of hell 😂
Not the grammar itself. But exceptions. And exceptions from exceptions.
Ever tried Finnish? Pronunciation is one of the simplest and stable there is. But the Grammar, it takes some work. And by some, I mean it can be a beast.
So is Portuguese grammar. Speaking, on the other hand, is very similar to Spanish but with a few differences.
@@DIYTAO Reading Finnish is for babies. But writing.. I had pretty good hang of how many aa there should be at the end of words, then i had a pause and now can't get any of them right, like if they changed the language while I was not doing it :D Finnish is cool hell
as a polish speaker i never understood english speaking people apologizing that they pronounced something wrong.
I guess it comes from the respect, Polish people have no issue with butchering words in other languages. :P
@@marikothecheetah9342 meh, I can butcher whole vocabularies and only I'd feel to apologise if I accidentally butcher someone name.
@@marikothecheetah9342 We even butcher our words so we don't take it seriously. I have alot of foreingers at my workplace and it's really fun hearing them try speaking polish.
It's a cultural thing. In Britain the most important thing is to appear polite and tactful, regardless how you really feel. That's why the British are so good at sarcasm and at obfuscating language, but also at decoding what the speaker really meant. This behaviour is also present in former British colonies to some extent.
So in this case, if an English speaker pronounces a foreign word not quite perfectly, they apologise preemptively to demonstrate that it was a genuine effort to say it right and they were not trying to insult anyone.
Its an american thing. They like to apologize cuz they always feel guilty for something.
There is a legend that somewhere in Austria two Germans are still trying to write "Brzęczyszczykiewicz" with the only reference being a Pole repeating his surname over and over to this day
On a loosely related note, I was browsing very old, low magnification, maps of Poland and they were from 1941 so German. And the place names were germanised. Some replaced with a german word (e.g. Sierpc >Schiselburg) but some were just written with german ortography. Which lead to me witnessing a "schtsch" cluster for "szcz"
@ Makes perfect sense, because schtch is the phonetic equivalent of szcz.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, powiat Łękołody.
@@UltimatePerfection to be more precise, Chrząszczyrzewoszyce, powiat Łękołody! :D
@UltimatePerfection one of my best friends in school was named Grzegorz. Found out a couple of years ago that he took his live, which broke my heart 😢. I miss you Grzesiu
for "szcz" combo i heard an amazing way to explain it from a guy who taught polish to foreigners - imagine you are making the shotgun reload sound.
I've never thought of that but definitely gonna use it.
this is cool. Pretty creative and it works.
@GdzieJestNemo OMG that is absolutely EPIC explanation...tried to imagine it ;-)
Hah, that's clever
The american way of teaching.
Sir, the recognition of Poland being in "central" Europe has brought you a lot of brownie points. And my sub 😁
Actualy in 14th century Czech and Polish language were almost identical, even the writing was, but then Czech writing came thrue simplifications and we replaced some sounds like for example CZ, SZ, RZ with diacritic Č, Š, Ř. So thet´s why Bohemia in polish is Czechy and in czech language its Čechy, its almost identical pronounciation.
And in czech there's still diference between h and ch or ř and ž while in polish the differences in h/ch and ż/rz are lost (except some regions).
@@T_Witek_T Yes, of course. But its interesting that polish RZ in medieval times sounded same like czech Ř and not like czech Ž :)
@@davidpelc More than twenty years ago I spoke with some guy who lived near Cieszyn (Těšín) - his grandma was still hearing the differences between h/ch and ż/rz and correcting him when he spoke incorrectly :). I am trying to learn some basic czech and hearing the differences between these letters is still a problem. But among other things probably not the worst ;-).
Yeah but due to historical reasons modern czech is still considered closer to old polish than current polish
Btw we have F in Polish alphabet thanks to Czech.
You did extremely well for the first time. Good job. Hilarious video, especially when he roasts English and shows how ridiculously inconsistent it is in vocalization of the letters/clusters/words. Like Ear, Bear, Beard, Pear, Hear, Heard, etc. Pretty much nonsensical to a Polish person in the early stages of learning English 🤣
You get used to it after some time. What you don't get used to is English names for cities, towns and villages - you never know whether you read them correctly. :P
As a Pole my favourite combo is bear beer beard bread
English is basically two separate languages, one spoken and one written ;p that's why spelling competitions (i believe they are called spelling bees?) are popular in English speaking countries but barely make sense in Polish, because Polish people can spell a word even if they hear it for the first time. The only thing that can be problematic are pairs of letters that sound the same - u/ó, ch/h and ż/rz, but they actually make sense in flexion and there are simple rules to know which one it should be, so it's not a problem for native speakers past elementary school ;p
Fun fact: they used to represent different sounds but merged into one in their basic form, but the distinction is still prevalent in other Slavic languages and looking at those different languages you can deduce the proper spelling in Polish ;p
Same in Finnish, no spelling bees. Actually it has even less exceptions. I'd say only one, letters N and G together make a unique consonant that has no one letter writing.
And yet most Poles can't spell correctly.
Actually, some letters change sounds... in "ów" "w" sounds different than in "wór", although the letters are almost the same.
Funny enough it's even easier in Czech. Because your groups of letters (cz, sz, ...) were replaced in Czech few hundred years ago. We called it "spřežky", and we replaced them in a simple manner: sz=š, cz=č and so on. So we have one letter for each sound. When spelling something, for example "šiška", we just repeat the exact sound you make when saying it. Ššššš, iiiii, ššššš, kkkkk, aaaaa. 😂
@@daevyl its called desonoryzation, happens to pairs of similar sounds that are different in fonation
As a Pole that knows a lot of Irish and Englishman that only speak English - it shows straight away that you know otger language and you are more flexible with pronunciations.
Some words you nailed on the first try. Others where git or miss but would be fully understandable bu any Pole. Good job!
Świetnie się bawiłam 😅 poradził sobie nawet nieźle
I don't speak Polish, I'm a stupid Hungarian, so all I can say is: Pole and Hungarian - two good friends, fighting, and drinking at the end. In Polish: Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki. The rhyming saying - which exemplifies the historical friendship between Hungarians and Poles. Nowadays, unfortunately, it is mainly Hungarian politicians who are trying to prevent this from happening, but that is another story...
Hungarian language is a beast. Your grammar is unbelievable.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Confirmed. We conjugate everything with everything and everything has an exception, even the exception has an exception.
It's not that hard, it just needs a different set of thinking. Since it is agglutinating, but once you accept this, and some other basic rules, it is pretty simple to learn it. :)
@@Ironfist85hu1 thanks for encouragement :D
Im Polish and i can say Magyar Lengyen ket jo barat, or something like that.
You're doing great!
I as a Czech can understand spoken Polis a bit, because of how similar our words are, but reading it is a a brain task because you have to figure out the consonant combos :D
An interesting fact for you: Czech used to look very much like Polis long time ago - we used to gave a lot of multigraphs (that's when 2 or more letters combine to a new sound). However Jan Hus (a priest who tried to reform the church (+- same ideas as Martin Luther had later on) and was burned for it) came up with diacritics (today's ´ and ˇ in Czech). Because of that we have out special "decorated" letters instead of using more consonants - cz -> č, sz -> š etc.
Our teacher always told us at school "If it weren't for Mr. Hus, we'd write like the Polish do!" and all the kids would do the "scared omg" face.
Otherwise, Czech has the same thing as Polish - each letter has it's one sound and that's it. I think Czech might be easier for you to learn how to read at first, because our letters will give you more hint as to how to read it.
And yes, it's very confusing when you're starting to learn English (I did at the age of 9, but nowadays kids start at the age of 6 or even sooner) and for a lot of people it's hard to tell how to read some words because of how many sounds can each letter make. And then you have words like "sewing" - like are you guys kidding me? XD
This video sort of sums it up nicely (warning: it's not for kids, there's a lot of swearing in it) th-cam.com/video/J6soT3dCLFc/w-d-xo.html
I agree on Czech language. Don't know much about grammar.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Oh the grammar is insane. Not for us, because we already know how to bend all the words, because we learn itfrom birth, so at school we only learn the rules on how to spell correctly (n/nn, y/i, s/z etc.).
But for a foreigner it means they'd first have to learn all the noun's genders and then learn how to bend them and the patterns (there's 14 for nouns only) and simlar for adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs.
@@alkemi5522 yuuup., it's all about the rules and exception to those rules :D
@@alkemi5522 As a foreigner learning Czech I can also tell you that "each letter has its one sound" is wrong and idk why Czechs keep telling that to everyone :D
mě and mně are pronounced the same, h is pronounced differently in hele/sníh/trh, hard consonants become soft before i and ě (the t in studenty becomes ť in studenti), soft consonants become hard at the end of words (zeď is pronounced like zeť), and even the infamous ř makes 2 slightly different sounds: "It is usually voiced, [r̝], but it also has a voiceless allophone [r̝̊] occurring in the vicinity of voiceless consonants or at the end of a word. (Wikipedia)"
And it's insane to me that Czechs actually hear these differences when I pronounce something slightly off... But it is much easier to read than Polish and the pronunciation rules are consistent, other than in English!
@@FlashheadX well yes, but the cases when the letters change the sound are mostly due to the ease of pronouncing (like the T in "svatba - you try to say T but it comes out as D), but learning how to spell these is tough for sure - even Czech kids truggle with that.
With ě the thing is it takes the hook of the letter before it so město is phonetically written as [mňesto].
Though my guess is the worst thing to learn is the object-verb alignment as in deciding whether it's a/i/y at the end of the verb based on the object's gender.
Never apologize for speaking Polish...
O Kurwa, you're right 😂
You should watch the video "If English were phonetically consistent"
I have never clicked so fast on any video. I am Polish living in UK for more than 10 years and it always cracks me up to the point of crying the first reactions atpolish alphabet ;-) Trust me it is not easy even for Poles😀 The first sentence at 2:00 means: '' Everyone generously pets abstemious bees''. Could not forget about the most epic polish tongue-twister : "W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie" (In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed) ;-)
Sometimes I think they left out the vowels from the Polish language. :-) Sorry, I'm just a silly Hungarian.
@@Scenario8 Nah...that is polish version of hardcore ;-)
I worked and had many Polish friends 20 years ago and I tried my best with the language but just couldn't,I'm not the greatest with languages anyway.
I do remember looking up, what are some of the most difficult languages in the world to learn and at number 7 was Polish 😮
@@magdalenaannasapieja7091 lol, you can learn something new every day :-)
Dont forget "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody. "
People say portuguese sounds like Russian or Polish but OH MY EFING GOD!!!! as a portuguese I feel kind of honoured that someone thinks my simple language is anything even close to Polish 🤣🤣🤣
Portuguese is that one language that couldn't decide whether to be Spanish or French, so it became both :P
But you guys have a lot of "sz" and "cz" sounds in your language
Langfocus made a FANTASTIC video on why Portugues and Russian and Polish may sound similar to even natives' ears :) th-cam.com/video/Pik2R46xobA/w-d-xo.html
Hooray! So I'm not alone. And I thought it was just my impression that Portuguese is similar to Slavic languages
Once in a hostel I met a group of people who I initially thought were Brazilians. It turned out they were from Slovenia.🙂
for me your language sounds like french spanish with russian vibe/melody :)
When I first saw this channel with the polish food, I knew this episode is gonna happen.
Greatings from Poland and thanks for praising the food.
2:08 This isn't a regular Polish sentence. It's a sentence created just to showcase these words and how ridiculous it might look to a foreigner who doesn't speak the language; it's a nonsense sentence, a tongue twister.
It literally means: "Everyone generously pets the abstemious bees." BS
Same as: Zażółć gęślą jaźń - Yellow the ego with a goose's wing.
or: Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami - A table with broken legs.
Here an example of normal polish sentence:
Zwykłe zdanie wygląda następUjąco: Te przykłady podane powyżej to zwykłe łamańce językowe. Which translates to:
A regular sentence looks as follows: The examples provided above are ordinary tongue twisters.
soł dys ys hał yt ys in polisz lengłydż - so this is how it is in polish language xD
NastępUjąco😉😊
@@inaanjakossowska6990 zgadza się!
I think “everyone pets the restrained bees” is a perfectly good sentence, and I’m going to try and drop it into a conversation every chance I get, whilst trying to pass it off as a Confucius quote 😊
I think if there ever were some restrained bees on display, certainly everybody would pet them if possible :P
Czech language sentence (25 words, 82 consonants and 0 vowels):
Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn
Try Hungarian next time. Beautiful and unique language. Greetings from Poland! :D
He definitely should. :D
Hello from Lithuania!
Facial expression when you try to listen in to Wszyscy in detail - priceless!
Half of my family is polish - i can barely say a word or two, it's just as hard to speak as it sounds :D
I am from Poland, and I think that Lithuanian sounds cool, kinda elfish :) Cheers!
😂 finally! Mój czas by błyszczeć! ✨️ Bardzo dobrze ci poszło 😎 good job!
I am native speaker of slovak language. Arguably closest to polish with czech.
I do understand polish quite easy.
But boy, o boy, when is it written- that is another chalenge.
But I found a way. Just reading aloud and focusing on sounds, instead of letters.
But beeing speaker of another language like english and get polish writing right is something which deserves respect. Its just unecessary complicated.
You're not the first person in the net who watch this video and is amused by the content and at the same time terrified by the complexity of the Polish language. Is not that bad as it seems to be. Even if you have no connection to the Polish you can easily learn the basic and most used phrases. The steep stairs begin when you start getting acquainted with Polish grammar. It has many rules, exception to the rules, and finally - exceptions from the exceptions. But don't worry. If you can utter a basic sentence in Polish, even in the unorthodox way, everybody would praise and applaud your effort.
There are some channels on YT made by the citizens of USA and subjects of King Charles who live in Poland and they speak Polish incredibly well. and they started from not even a scratch... All the best mate :)
I remember once somebody pointed out that every "c" in "Pacific Ocean" is read differently and I can't stop thinking about it. That is so odd xD
Anyway, as a Polish native I think you did amazing. There was a one off word or something but it still was a very good try. :) Keep going!
Btw wanna know what that sentence meant? XD
"Everyone is generously petting restrained (or abstinent) bees".
Same with the "a" in Australia😂
Always nice to watch your reaction videos . Greetings from Poland 🇵🇱🤝🇺🇸
the Z after consonant behaves the same as czech háček, so it only looks so different at the start..we had those untill 13/14century, zprzeszky it was called I believe🙋🇨🇿
I'm a polish australian, so I'm glad I've found your channel.
10:56 you nailed it, the last attempt before shaking your head was close to perfect!
in Dutch we have words like slechtstschrijvend if you want words that look like a cat ran over the keyboard.
Looks like almost normal word to me slecht(add random stuff that looks dutch here)vend
slechtstschrijvend - badly/wrongly written?
Poles think about Dutch what rest of the world thinks about Polish.
@@TerribleAcid And what would that be?
@@marikothecheetah9342 no that's slechtschrijvend.
Slechtstschrijvend is "Most badly written"
As a Pole and your Subscriber I will tell you: bravo! :) Great video.
Fun fact - almost no kids in Poland like Polish (literature) lessons at school. Grammar is absolute hell and they will torture you with it for years :P
Btw this is also the reason why Polish people really appreciate it when foreigners at least try to learn some super basic Polish or even just some words for exchanging pleasantries. We know that its really hard (we went thru it and its hard even for who grew up with the language).
I absolutely love your attitude and as far I can judge as a Slovak native speaker, you did a decent job. The original video is amazing- dude is a brilliant educator and hilarious guy.
About the W/F:
What happens there is something we call "ubezdźwięcznienie", or "deresonification". It's a type of phonetic simplification.
Basically, the way I learned it at school, all sounds are divided into sonorants and obstruents, with the difference being whether your vocal cords vibrate or not.
A lot of sounds in Polish make Sonorant/Obstruent pairs: G/K, B/P, W/F etc.
I am not sure about the specifics, as it's been almost 20 years since I graduated from high school, but a rule of thumb is that, if a sonorant (W, B, G, RZ) is located next to an obstruent (T, P, K, F), it loses its resonance, and becomes its obstruent counterpart (W->F, B->P, G->K, RZ->SZ).
In the example he's given, WSZYSCY, [W] would normally be pronounced like [V] in VERY, but because [SZ] (SH) is right next to it, it would take you a lot of effort to actually pronounce [V] and then switch to [SH], so instead it is easier to just pronounce [W] as [F].
Same thing happens in WSTRZEMIĘŹLIWE - what he _doesn't_ point out, is that [RZ] also changes into [SZ], due to the [T] located right before it. So _technically_ it is pronounced as FSTSZEMIĘŹLIWE, not WSTRZEMIĘŹLIWE.
This!
I guess the original vid author did not joke about not paying attention at school ;)
I’m rooting for you, learning new languages is pretty hard but it pays off!
Hello from Finland 🇫🇮
In Polish the pronunciation is not intimidating, the grammar is. Most of the words can have multiple endings which adjust it's meaning. Exec opposition of English, where grammar is easy and consistent but pronunciation has no sense.
"it's not that hard"
immediately reads the ó in kraków wrong despite reading the u in grubas right (they're the same sound)
@@aonodensetsu 🤣🤣
14:00 I love how in that second terrified realisation kicked in XDD
Keep it up man!
As a native Slavic speaker I'm kinda fine with the consonants, but those extra vowels melt my brain 😅
10:57 - perfect, ideal reading! Bravo!
When I was growing up, the Poles got a lot of stick in Europe, very unfairly. There were lots of Polish kids at local schools (following WWII), all with seemingly unpronouncable names. One kid my age smiled and told me, "How can you say our names are strange when you have local boys here named Wmffre, Ieuan, Llýr, and Bendigeudfran?" We were Welsh, of course! 😅
Szczerze dziękuję za powyższy komentarz 🙂
The first "wszyscy" was really good - everyone would understand what you mean, no problem. Cheapeau Bas!
Also: I wouldn't put my faith in most of Poles to read this sentence flawlessly in the first try, so certainly don't sweat it - 99% of everyday sentences don't have that concentration of these difficult sounds in one place :)
Thanks for the video - it was awesome!
I've seen many people trying to read this sentence, and you did it very well.
10:57 YOU SAID IT SO CORRECT WHATT your pronounciation is crazy good I refuse to believe you re doing it for the first time
you did really well! most of the words you said correctly at your first try. Well done!
well some words you have perfectly pronounce so great job!!!
All the "sz", "cz", "rz" etc. are digraphs - basically a combo of 2 letters representing one sound. Polish is actually really consistent. Once you figure out how to pronounce each letter or each digraph you can read everything quite easily. It's the grammar that is a bit more complicated because we have the dreaded declension. We have 7 cases and we conjugate everything unlike e.g. in French where you only do verbs. And trust me, it's not easy even for native speakers. I admit I love my mother tongue because it equipped me to learn so many more just by the virtue of being insane with its sounds combos lol
Now for a crazy written =/= spoken language you should take a look at Gaeilge (Irish).
I lived in the uk from 0,5 year old up to 10 years old. So english is my first language and when i lived in poland FROM 10-20 years old it took me about 1 year to get used to polish reading but grammar... to this day i am still learning i feel like its so complicated for no reason and i just personally will always prefer english.
P.s. you did an incredible job honestly for an english speaking person
Also, if you want to train your pronunciation:
_Chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie w Szczebrzeszynie, strząsa skrzydła z dżdżu, a trzmiel w puszczy tuż przy Pszczynie straszny wszczyna szum. Mąż gżegżółki w chaszczach trzeszczy, w krzakach drzemie kszyk, a w Trzemesznie straszy jeszcze wytrzeszcz oczu strzyg._
_A beetle is crying in reeds near Szczebrzeszyn, shaking rain off from his wings, and in the wilderness next to Pszczyna, a bumblebee is raising an awful ruckus. Coockoo's husband is trashing in the thicket, a snipe is napping in the bushes, and in addition, a striga's eyes' stare is haunting in Trzemeszno._
Good luck :)
Really well done for a first try! You did better than most Polish children when they start speaking the language. Kids usually simplify some of the more difficult pronunciations.
So if you don't get it 100 % no one will be annoyed, it actually sounds cute. 😊
I'm impressed by how good your Polish pronounciation is
Your pronounciation is suprisingly good! I know it needs practice to make it easy for you, but here, when you're focused it sounds amazingly close :)
it make sense that in poland everybody pet bees that don't endulge in adictive substances
We got an IWrocker POLAND FOCUSED VIDEO?! as a Polish/American that lives in Poland this is gonna be funny 😅❤
As a student of English (bachelor) we are taught there are two variants Rhotic and non-Rhotic. Unfortunately we focus mostly on Modern Received Pronunciation which is non-rhotic but we discuss other variants. The most surprising for me was African American Vernacular English
Dobrze było, jak na pierwszy raz! Czekam na kolejne wideo z polskim językiem!
So, I'm a Russian, and I'm also seeing this beautiful "How to read Polish or something" video for the second time. And you know what? I still can't read this sentence 😀 Even though it is definitely easier for me to understand and pronounce the sounds than it is for you. So that will take some time and effort, but don't get discouraged!
P.S. Cyrillic alphabet is quite similar to Polish from the sounds perspective (not completely the same, but not that different), the letters are just written differently.
Cyrillic was made for Slavic languages, how they use sounds. But Polish said hold my consonants!
I think Cyrillic alphabet is simillar to Greek one. That is how I remembered the signs.
@@martinasirillova7391 The Latin is also similar to the greek AB since they both came but fucked it up
Can you read it now: "ВШЫСЦЫ ГЛАЩО ВСТЖЭМИЭЗИЛИВЭ ПЩОЛЫ"? 😅
@@TheWTZ1983 well, sure 😀 the third word, though... still doesn't look easy to pronounce 😅
Being Niemcy, that was very interesting. Will have to rewtach that on my own time a few times.
@Ian: Concerning English, probably the best kinown example is that you can pronounce "ghoti" as "fish" - gh as in "enough", o as in "women", ti as in "nation"
nice i enjoyed the video about my northern brothers :)
I like the "ough" combination in English when there is talk about confusing words and pronunciation.
I remember from doing Japanese in school, there are a few phrases like using "ka" at the end to make it a question, "desu" (say as Dess) to end a sentence, and deshita (Deshta) to imply past tense, or some variant.
and there are hundred ways to say: after, because etc. :D Also, desu is a copula verb, it's not a verb per se, but an aid to express the verb.
@@marikothecheetah9342 And that's just in formal language. Informally, it's da.
@ yup.
You are doing pretty well with this Polish sentence. Actually, you are doing much better than others youtubers trying this one.
I wish you luck in your language learning journey! It may not be a hobby for everyone since it takes lot of effort, but it is definitely a rewarding process that will, maybe surprisingly, help you think in a brand new way in your own head. And through learning a new language you will learn things about your own you didn't even realize that you knew before. It's truly amazing and if you really get into it, i have 2 major advices:
1 - don't use the duolingo as your main learning source. It's a vocab practice at best and entirely useless at worst. You need some other source that provides an actual explanation, ideally a language speaker who you can ask questions and get answers from
2 - practice every day. Even if it's just something small like making a habit of writing a shopping list in polish and reading it aloud as you read it to get used to the sound and to practice vocabulary. Little effort put into this consistently every day goes a long way
It's cool to hear you speak my mother tongue. You did really good!
IWrocker I recommend the Williams Language Adventure channel. He tells his story of moving to Poland and learning Polish😊
I have the upmost respect for people who can learn 2 or more languages. I can barely speak English and I’ve been speaking it for almost 50 years
No laughing, just smiling the whole video 😊 you did great
As a Finn, Polish is truly impossible to learn.
than, you should learn hungarian :D for you its easier :D
True, but certainly not for sounds and evocation, but for grammar. Sound reading though is fun, and I must say this man managed to actually provide a good base for being able to read.
Nah, Polish looks scary because sometimes we combine a lot of digraphs together (like sz, rz or dż). The grammar might be somewhat complicated (because of 7 grammatical cases and 3 grammatical genders), but at least we don't have 15 or 18 cases like Finnish or Hungarian ;D
Heyy, as a Pole i could said exactly te same about Finnish :) chears mate!
as Polish i have same sentiments toward Suomalainen
I always though Romanian pronunciation is hard for a foreigner, but after hearing how Polish sounds, it's on another level lol... I couldn't read a single word of what he presented :))
You do a pretty good job with your quick pronunciation :) so dont be scared, You doing well at your first try.
The guy in this video is brilliant, the way he shows the difference between pronunciation and spelling deserves a medal. Your face when he read it in one breath after explaining all the letters was priceless.
greetings from Poland
It's true that in Chicago there are a lot of Poles living there since the war, and even earlier, they have their own companies, they do business. That's probably why Trump wants to start the immigration purge there. Because he couldn't cope with wszyscy szczodrze głaszczą wstrzemięźliwie pszczoły 🤣😂🤣
How excited you were in this video and how much you smiled and laughed just shows how wrong the school system is. This is how things should be like. Learning shouldn't be a torture
You did REALLY great!!!
The alphabet and pronunciation are just a warm-up. Polish grammar and its rules are pure masochizm. Trust me, I'm native speaker
The 'o' in English, has less variation in the north of England, where the (American) difference between stop and mob, are all pronounced like mob.
scottish english specifically uses lots of the same sounds as slavic languages
The Pole reading the text does not submit individual letters creating a word, but all they need to do is look at the word and knows its meaning another matter as he writes. Polish has about 40,000 words of words, one word can be caused by accident (7 cases!) Other varieties, times have 40 characters.
Well these are tongue twisters for ourselves aswell. 😅 In normal daily use its far from that kind of taxing spelling. Polish unlike english still has spelling and pronounciaion the same, when dosens of words can have same pronohnviation whith different spelling, polish almost has none of that, so letters always mean the same sound.
One trick missing in the video: try splitting the words into syllables and pronouncing them individually. wszy-scy szczo-drze gła-szczą wstrze-mię-źli-we pszczo-ły. Should be much easier.
That is how words in an English dictionary tend to be presented.
I saw few videos of people watching this and I think you pronounced the words best out of those I saw.
Edit: 17:53 that is a thing in early primary school level english books, to help children with understanding how to pronaunce stuff.
So for example you would have a page with columns that looks like this:
Polish. English. Pronauciation.
Co? What? Łot?
Co jesz? What are you eating? Łot ar ju iting?
I don't know if they still do that, but I remember it being a thing in like 2013 or something.
You actually did amazing!
I would like to give you a tip
Whenever you’re learning how to pronounce things, try to do it over and over again, even when repeats each syllable, not just once at the end and especially NOT fast
I know it’s tempting to want to be able to say the end product word at the speed it’s supposed to be said, but if you do it in slowmotion your brain will process the sounds organically and more easily
"gud dżob" for the first time
if you want to get confused look up vid "How English sounds to non-English speakers" - It's amazing how they manged to sound like legit english while making absolutely no sense
With u and ó ch and h and rz and ż it's good to remember that historically they DID sound different but this difference has been eradicated and is only reflected in spelling. like in English -ious words will be either of French or Latin origin.
When it comes to pronunciation the voiced consonants are devoiced in speech, so w-f, d-t, b-p, especially in the final position or if followed by voiceless consonant (w followed by s in wszyscy). W will remain w when in front of a vowel, like in woda (water).
When learning Polish it's good to learn syllabisation, i.e. dividing words into syllables, as they will tell you when to cluster letters together and when not. so in wszyscy we have two syllables: wszys-cy. Words with double consonants like: lekko, miękko, lotto, have a glottal stop between them (English has it in: light (on)) and they are separated in syllables: lek-ko.
There's a lot of rules and exceptions to the rules but I wouldn't worry too much, your average Polish person speaks very ungrammatically and pronounces words very incorrectly :P
Also, the sentence in the video is a tongue twister, we don't usually speak like that and I have yet to see somebody using wstrzemięźliwie on a daily basis :D
Also, Polish children spend a lot of time learning the correct pronunciation, when they are little, because even for natives all that rustle sound can be difficult, so don't worry, if you find it difficult - natives have the same problem.
polish is within the 5-10 hardest languages to learn 👍
7:14 In Serbian we similarly have a harder and softer version of the 'ch' sound (written Ч for the harder and Ћ for the softer), except they are much more strictly different than in Polish. Saying ch like in cheese is pretty much saying both Ч and Ћ together-too soft for one and not soft enough for the other.
Alright i now finished the video and this defenetly goes way beyond my polish skills haha. My reaction were the same as yours mostly Holy crap 😂
I worked a lot of construction in Berlin. So greetings to my Kurwa Inc. Colleagues 🎉
in szczodrze at end you pronunciation was very good 👍
-What is your super power?
-I speak Polish.
🤣
The way you said 'Kraków' is similar to how it would be spoken in English ('Krakov'). Basically, you read the "ó" (as you would read "oo" in "moon") as "o" (as you would read "o" in "sock").
I'm so happy that my Thai nieces can speak English. Thai is with a lot of tonal variances. The same word can mean something totally different in a higher or lower tone plus they have different words for when you are a girl talking to a girl or when you are a man talking to girl enz... I tried to learn it once, and I immediately gave up. Too difficult. I do want to learn Polish for my brother's children. Luckily, he's learning them Dutch too. So his children will be learning 3 languages since they are born: Dutch, Polish and English.
In polish there are also variations for the femine/masculine words. For eg. "White": She is biała, he is biały, they (men) are biali, they (women) are białe.
There is also difference in tone, depends on the tone you can ask the question or announce it, for eg. Are we going there?/we are going there = idziemy tam? Idziemy tam.
Some people also think poles are rude when they say for eg. "give me that", but in polish if You use this command with nice tone, it is normal.
@@Karolina-ge6hr yeah, i noticed some of them, but they seem logical. when you talk about woman, you use the -a. is it an man it is -i or -y. We have male and woman words too, but not that logical, with "de" and "het" before the word in Dutch.
Hi
You did it almost great Ian. You need to simply polish your Polish 😉
Greetings from Warsaw 🇵🇱
"życie żona zeżarła" and "rząd zarzut korzyść": "wife ate life" and "government, accusation, profit" - somehow ads hilarity to the whole proceedings :D
Man love your videos. I can recommend trying some tonguetwisters 🤣 like if you think polish is hard try Islandic 👀 i mean it almost sounds like spell 😂
10:58 you said szczodrze perfectly at this exact second :)
you should try read whole sentence, you did really well
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz looks and listens
If you learn Interslavic, you have a good chance of being understood in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
your last attempt in "szczodrze" sounded really good compared to rest, but you already given up my guy hah. you already sounded like slav trying to speak polish lol. nice vid.
Reading is the easiest thing in Polish. Writing is considerably harder due to orthography - there are rules when to write u/ó, ż/rz, h/ch etc. but also there are many exceptions to these rules. But for foreigners the real fun begins when it's time to create their own sentences - that's when they run into insane number of possible word endings.
reading aloud and saying stuff in polish (even) without understanding is actually quite easy. understanding polish words is not as difficult as people think either. but it gets ridiculously hard when it comes to trying to process and understand spoken sentences.
You know, learning languages is useful for many reasons. One of them is that it gives brain more tools, more patterns to use.
It is often cited that when speaking or writing in another language the way you express your personality will change. You can think of it as sort of light case of split personality, you will be still you but - you might be nicer or more mean, more playful or more serious on average. So it has impact on behavior, it's like your perspective is changed ever so slightly on everything, things seem more or less important in particular language. Once you can form thoughts in another language you can sort of hack yourself to switch these modes without having to actually speak the language.
To me, if I think in Polish about "pieniądze" (means money) it seems more important than if I switch to thinking in english, money just doesn't seem to strike same pathways in my brain, it seems less relevant. So on me the effect is that while in "english" mode I'd be more likely to spend and be generous with cash. While I'm normally pinching every penny. There is dissociation, but some other things might be more relevant - if you like the word in foreign language and make some associations with it - it can be more relevant than same thing in your native language.
So learning at least like one foreign language is very important, just for self-development. Just for that perspective it can provide. Even if you end up not really use that language in your daily life, is important that you have ability form thoughts in it.
Sadly a lot of people just learn how to replicate language, how to simply use it to communicate but don't really make any effort to sort of integrate it internally - you can recognize that if you see people speaking in very fragmented manner, where they need to take a long time between words or phrases to replicate them inside their head, how these phrases are meant to sound. I think it's kinda dumb for them to say that they know the language if they just replicate words and structures. I see a lot of people like that in Poland, claiming to know english only to produce atrocious replicas of sentences and phrases they've learned, without any real flexibility just butchering the language stuttering out word after word in annoying mess.