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