Category: foreign languages

Polish: a hard language made harder by the Latin alphabet

Regular readers will know that I am a language aficionado. Years ago, I was a Japanese language translator/interpreter.

The languages that I’m currently learning and/or maintaining include Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, German, and Russian.

I’ve dabbled some with Italian and Portuguese, too. But I’ll likely wait to get serious about those. (They both overlap too much with Spanish.)

I have been tempted by Polish at times. Poland is a country that I would very much like to visit someday.

But I have to confess—Polish is simply too much of a mess for me to take on at this point.

What do I mean by “a mess”? Watch the video above for starters. But all Slavic languages contain multiple case endings. Russian case endings are no piece of cake.

The biggest problem with Polish, though, is its whacky phonetic system.

Let’s begin with all the consonant clusters. Below are some of the Polish surnames in my immediate social circle:

  • Szymkowiak
  • Perszyk
  • Stopczynski

Here is a simple Polish sentence:

Która jest godzina teraz w Warszawie?

(“What time is it in Warsaw now?”)

If you listen to the above sentence in Polish, you’ll find little relation between what you expect Latin letters to do, and what the Polish language requires them to do. When you learn Polish, you have to relearn the Latin alphabet again from scratch.

Polish is a language that really should be using the Cyrillic alphabet, instead of a [highly] modified version of the Latin alphabet. But given Poland’s current focus on the West, and its troubled history with Russia, I doubt that’s ever going to happen.

-ET

Japanese salaryman dramas

A quick personal reading note: I’m on volume 6 of 課長島耕作 (Kachou Shima Kousaku). I’m rereading the whole series, which I read for the first time in the mid-1990s.

And yes, I’m reading it in the original Japanese. I was a Japanese language translator throughout much of the 1990s. I started studying Japanese back in 1988.

But if you don’t read Japanese, you can probably find the long-running Shima Kousaku series in English. (I’ve definitely seen it out there.)

People who know about my Japanese-language background often ask me about manga. Do I like it?

Well…yes and no. In general, I don’t care for the (often) sexualized fantasy tropes that comprise so much of the manga sphere. I much prefer the more realistic Japanese manga; and Shima Kousaku is my favorite.

The Shima Kousaku series begins in the 1980s. It follows the journey of a Japanese corporate employee, or salaryman, as he moves up the ladder of his employer, Hatsushiba Electric.

Not much happens in these stories, in terms of high-concept plot. These are basically soap operas, but they’re exceptionally well-done soap operas, with plenty of microtension.

A story doesn’t need zombies and car chases to be enthralling. (Though a story certainly can be enthralling with zombies and car chases; don’t get me wrong.)

-ET