man I find german harder than polish
Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.
Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.
Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.
Or invent the internet.
How long until internet slang/lingo snowballs out of control and becomes an actual language? I mean, it's already constantly spawning words and a diverse enough environment.
I notice sometime I lack an optimal word to describe a concept IRL that an internet term would fit perfectly but would be cringe or meaningless unless the listener was also terminally online. There's also stealing terms from other languages that catch on, but that don't work offline(IE. Zeitgeist, pantsdrunk, kawaii) that get spread around enough to be generally know, even if a bit odd.Yes, including brainrot. Especially brainrot. It's not all pleasant.
Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.
Thank Teddy Roosevelt and Queen Victoria for that
If ya dont you will be beaten by Roosevelt's "big stick".
Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat
Iceland: Hlær að öllum
drinks your einstock
Lithuanian: Palaikyk mano alų.
Getting a Haer'Dalis vibe
I think that "kokoa koko kokko kokoon" is a perfectly normal sentence and no one can change my mind.
The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.
The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"
The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.
Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you're trying to spell/pronounce in order to get ... oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.
Ah, what you're saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.
For example, here's how to ask a yes/no question in...
- Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for "yes", but still has this sort of question.)
- Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
- Polish - start the sentence with "czy".
- German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
- English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support "do", then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that "do" instead. Noting that semantic "do" also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support "do", yielding questions like "did you do this?"
Then there's the adjective order. In Latin for example it's just a "...near the noun? Whatever, just don't be ambiguous." Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don't you dare to switch them - "your famous blue raincoat" is a-OK, but *"your blue famous raincoat" makes you sound like a maniac.
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess
The alternative is Czech.
Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.
That's how it always starts, then the nerds get hold of it
English syntax hard?
There's a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they're spoken in the English alphabet. Then people wonder why they're spelled like Ledoux and sound like Lehdoo.
Romance. Romance languages are the fucking reason you word slurring tongue twats.
But hey, at least we're not Turkik.
English syntax hard?
Yes. Sequence of tenses. It's harder than Latin. As in, what the hell does "future-in-the-past" mean?
Or tenses (+aspect+mood) in general, I guess. You guys have too many of them.As for the orthography, you know what is to blame. The Great Vowel Shift.
English syntax hard?
Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don't really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of "famous blue raincoat").
That happens because any language is complex, there's no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won't be able to get rid of it.
There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.
That's something else, the spelling. It's a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you're supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.
Just come up with new letters, Lithuanian has 9 (ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, č, š, ž) extra letters. If a small language can do it, so can English.
It's actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting "everyone" (more like "enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored") on the same page. Doubly true when it's a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there's none.
For English there's an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).
Then there's Italian. We have less letters than other European languages (we don't have k,j,w,x,y) and we still manage to avoid shit like "thoroughly" or spamming letters. We have accents, but use them way less than in Spanish and no special accents or characters like ñ ç č ß å ø ö etc
Once you understand the rules is probably one of the easier languages to spell and pronounce
Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.
It's all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:
- Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
- Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
- English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
- Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
- Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩
? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that's for different reasons, same reasons as ck.
I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you're right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should've said "English" alone.
Bezwzględny Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz wyruszył ze Szczebrzeszyna przez Szymankowszczyznę do Pszczyny. I choć nieraz zalewała go żółć, niepomny następstw znalazł ostatecznie szczęście w źdźble trawy.
EDIT: copy/pasted from somewhere, this looks incredible to pronounce! The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.
The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.
You're right, you know just one word in Polish, because it's Żubrówka you filthy peasant.
😆
It may look hard, but those are more of a spelling nightmare than pronounciation ones
Hard ones to pronounce are for example: "Chrząszcz brzmi w trzczcinie w szczebrzeszynie" or "stół z powyłamywanymi nogami"
Or "wyrewolwerowany rewolwer"
My classmates and I played around with that one a lot back in primary school – I think I once managed to say "wyrewolwerowany rewolwerowiec wyrewolwerowuje wyrewolwerowany rewolwer" without skipping a beat.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiwicz is a popular joke name. Plausible sounding, but, to my surprise, not registered to actually exist. Yet to close to my real name for me to find the video link all that funny, rather than a common expirience even with other Poles.
Like a cat dancing on a keyboard.
I feel like we'd all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn't in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody's cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.
Did Hungary annex Slovakia again or what?
I genuinely stopped to think whether "next door" would prompt somebody to get pedantic about this and decided to keep it for expediency and to make the sentence flow better.
I'm not even mad about it, honestly.
We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.
Are you sure it wasn't "brzeczyszczykiewicz" (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha
Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?
I remember some video where somebody was showing an example of either a word or a sentence & showed: "mbrtskvni"
this language would make you think they have to pay a fee for using vowels
Kinda weird to isolate Polish when Hungarian, Finnish and Basque are actually all their own distinct language families.
Polish actually isn't in a distinct language family and shares a lot with other western Slavic languages like Czech, and Slavic languages in general.
Maybe it's because it was in the same language group as those others that polish got singled out. People who speak an Indo European language will expect to be lost when first trying to learn a language outside of the group, but might not expect to be so confuddled from a related language. Expectations basically.
Yeah, my first thought was, isn't Hungarian far more complex/different. Also, Icelandic is meant to be very difficult to learn too!
I don't think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.
laughs in Welsh
Can't say I've ever been to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
…but I can say its name!
(maybe)
This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.
It's not spelling, it's the grammar and ortography that would make you want to peel your skin off.
Like the couple dozen ways why can say "two".
It's not just numbers. Almost all verbs are like that.
Say "jumping" - skakać
I am jumping - skaczę I was jumping (male) - skakałem I was jumping (female) - skakałam you are jumping (singular) - skaczesz you were jumping (singular male) - skakałeś you were jumping (singular female) - skakałaś you are jumping (plural) - skaczecie you were jumping (plural male) - skakaliście you were jumping (plural female) - skakałyście they are jumping - skaczą they were jumping (male) - skakali they were jumping (female) - skakały
And so on and so on. You have no chance of remembering all of that - you either learn the rules and how to apply them, or you fail at polish language
Po twojej pysznej zupie
Nie ruszam dupy z klopa
Ta zupa była z mlekiem;
Na mleko mam alergię
Po twojej pysznej zupie
Nie ruszam dupy z klopa
Ta zupa była z mlekiem;
Na mleko mam alergię
...
Tylko jedno w głowie mam
koksu 5 gram
Hey, do you maybe know the Polish alphabet song? I was searching for it on the internet forever, but I don't speak Polish so I could not google the correct phrase. It started like this (reconstructed from oral lore using Google Translate):
Berlin miastem w Niemczech leże
burdel - miejsce dla młodzieży
guzik to jest częścią ubrania
gówno jest produktem srania
dynia to jest do jedzenia
dupa to jest do pierdzenia
...
And it supposedly continued all the way to letter Z.
I'm sorry but I'm Lithuanian so I don't really consume polish media. Good luck in your search tho :3
Po twojej pysznej zupie
Nie ruszam dupy z klopa
Ta zupa była z mlekiem;
Na mleko mam alergię
Ja jestem Kurwa. Dziękuje bardzo.
Took 2 years of Polish at University. I spent more time on that one class than all my other classes combined... And I went to school for Education.
Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.
Would be so much shorter with a щ
I wonder if we had ž etc like Czechs would it make it easier for foreigners to read
Is ź and ż not enough? =D
It would certainly make Polish easier to read for Czechs. Not sure about other foreigners, šžčřě might be just as alien.
I'm learning Polish, and spelling (rz dz sz cz ł and ą ę ż ś) is all fine for me-- the thing I struggle with is the grammatical cases. The fact that the ending of everything changes is what has caused me to give up twice 🥺
I will pick it up again, but I sucked at the Masculine/Feminine thing with French, and this is a lot more difficult.
CAT:
- KOT
- KOTA
- KOTU
- KOTEM
- KOCIE <--- (This is where I quit: Locative case took the T away WTF?!)
Przepraszam moja drogi!!
The T turning into C is called somehow, I don't remember how, but it's used quite often. For example, "expensive" and "more expensive" would be "drogo" and "drożej". I think there were even some tables for all the transformations, but I might misremember things
Me, a non European who only speaks english, so true
Haha yeah I get it.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz z Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody.
Gesundheit.
Did you see all the Zs in there? They're obviously talking in their sleep.
And when polish gets drunk, I always laugh because it changes a bit. They said its imposible to read polish subtitle on films, that is why they have a monoton voice reading out loud. They were the naughtiest in babylon 🤣
That's actually not that bad. Definitely better than dubbing. The voiceover lets You understand everything said, but You can focus on the picture unlike with subtitles. And the monotone voice over the dialogue lets You hear the emotions of the actors.
Oh this is really cool. I didn’t know that! So foreign films brought to Poland are spoken over with a Polish translator, just like you’d have at the UN? That way you can hear the original actors and the translated dialogue in Polish?
How does this work for trying to learn a new language? I have heard of many people learning English by watching English movies and TV shows with subtitles in their own language. This allows them to listen to English and slowly start to pick up English words while still being able to understand what’s happening due to the subtitles. I myself am learning Chinese and I occasionally watch cooking videos in Chinese with English subtitles and find myself gradually picking up the Chinese words as I hear them.
I think this technique probably works best with shows and movies written for children, as those have much simpler dialogue to begin with.
*cries at Greek
Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?
Ä, ö, ü, õ, š, ž are just there to allow for phonemic ortography, biatch!
Though then again, I'm fairly sure that the weird Polish letters.
Also if your native tongue DOES have phonemic ortography.... Well guess how difficult it was for 6 year old me in Estonia to start learning English where the words are clearly not written the same way they're spoken????
It gets worse hearing older people here speak English because most of them did NOT start learning the language at age 5 or 6 so uhhhh... Yeah they expect the words to be pronounced the way they're spelled. Makes your ears bleed.
Doesn't Lithuanian have tonal components? That has to be worst then Polish.
