Puppy = Happiness

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Recently I’ve been spotting more and more polish words which make my inner word-geek sit up and take notice.  There’s probably all sorts of similar words in English, but as a native speaker I simply don’t notice them.

I’ve said before that I’m a “pattern-spotter” by nature.  Show me enough data and I start to see patterns that interest me and a foreign language is full of connections which to a new learner are crying out for a way to tie together and make sense of this jumble of new words.

So today I’m going to share some of more recent ones which have made me smile:

Szczenię / Szczeniak – Puppy

Szczęście – Happiness

Coincidence?  I think not…

Wielo – Many/Multi-

Ryb – Fish (plural genitive)

Wieloryb – Whale  or literally, many fish or multi-fish

(or more accurately probably from Wielki-ryb – Great Big Fish..)

Or another one

Sześć – Six

Ścian – Walls (plural genitive)

Sześcian – Cube … a thing with 6 walls!

One that’s not quite so neat, but it’s stuck with me for the past few weeks is Baby.  I must have heard different words dozens of times over the past couple of years, but none of them stuck in my memory.  Then half way through class, this word was written on the board :

Niemowlę

It could be because of some work I’ve been doing to break words apart by prepositions (more on that in a future post), but the moment the word appeared, it split into 2 words for me.

Nie  +  mowlę

And this is where it pays to not be a fluent speaker yet because I didn’t know that mowlę wasn’t a word, but it was darned close to words I knew based on the verb Mowić.  When you’re pattern spotting, it’s good not to worry about the perfect grammar or perfect spelling – you’re looking for memory aids which help you remember words or inversely help you imply meaning from words you’ve never seen before.

Even before the picture of the Baby was revealed under the word, my brain was seeing :

Nie + mowlę  and roughly translating that to something like “not speaking”.  It turns out to be a pretty apt description of a baby as a “non-speaker“.  So much so that 4 weeks later, the word is still burned into my brain without any extra effort to remember it.

So that’s today’s food for thought while it was fresh in my mind from the latest discovery.  I’m going to try to be more active on the blog again as a change up my learning approach again, so there’s likely to be more “interesting word of the day” ideas and some thoughts on hacking the Polish language to make it easier to learn that have been going around in my head for a while, but would benefit from writing down & hopefully someone else finds useful one day.

Do widzenia!

Why you should learn to pronounce new words backwards

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Today, I have a tip which I’ve found has worked for me for a while, but I’ve been trying to figure out WHY it works before I posted something.

At its core, it’s very simple.  You find a new word in Polish and it’s full of complex sound clusters & you inevitably stumble over it syllable at a time and wonder how badly you’re mangling the Polish language when you’re done.  Been there, done that a few hundred times..

Let’s start with an example which you may or may not find a challenge, but it helps me illustrate the point.

Your new word is Szczęsnowicz.  Don’t worry – if you find that one too obvious, just bear with me for the sake of the example!

So, if you do it the obvious way, you’ll start by saying something like:

Sz…  Szcz… Szczęs… Szczęsnow… Szczęsnowicz..

Success!!  🙂

Now compare what you’re saying to this native pronunciation : Szczęsnowicz

Go ahead and click that link and play it a few times… I’ll wait..

Ok, so if you’re anything like me then you’ll find you were emphasizing entirely the wrong syllable.  Listen again and you’ll notice that the emphasis is here : SzczęsNOWicz.

Now the Polish language is full of wonderful complexities, so I like to celebrate a common rule when I come across one, just to remind myself that fluency is achievable one day.  The rule with Polish spoken language is that the emphasis is always on the penultimate (next to last) syllable in the word.  

I’ll say that again because it’s a really important point and I finally realized that this was the cornerstone of why learning new complex words backwards was a great idea.

The rule with Polish spoken language is that the emphasis is always on the penultimate (next to last) syllable in the word.

So let’s go back to the way you’ve been stumbling through vocalizing new words :

Sz…  Szcz… Szczęs… Szczęsnow… Szczęsnowicz..

Because you’re focusing on the syllables as they rush up to meet you – you’re not going to spot the fact that you’ve reached the penultimate one.  Sure, you’ve reached the end and you’ve finally managed to say Szczęsnowicz, but if you’re anything like me, you’re probably emphasizing the częs part.

Instead of this let’s work backwards syllable by syllable :

icz… NOWicz… częsNOWicz… szczęsNOWicz..

Success!  Because it was the 2nd syllable you encountered, you can immediately start emphasizing it right and then hang on to that emphasis as you add successive syllables to your pronunciation.

Dog barking? Shhhh.. Wait!!

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Sometimes I have a total mental block on a certain word.  While I’m on Skype with my teacher, my dog has a habit of wanting to join in the conversation.  As a result, I must have asked her the word for “bark” a dozen times in the past year and I was still failing to remember it.

Looking back through my notepad, I’ve written it down 8 times at least that I can quickly see.  It sticks in my head as a word with “sz” and “k” in it, but the rest just fades, yet today for the 1st time I noticed something obvious and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it again.

It comes right back to my usual mechanism for remembering words, which is anchoring some aspect of them to another word or image and it reinforces for me just how important it is to hold that web of connections.  This is a word, I’d just been keeping in isolation in my head.  I hadn’t really looked at it and made the effort to decompose the word or link it.

So, the word in question is Szczekać (to bark).  Take a second to sound that out a couple of times..  It’s just a series of shh and k sounds, which is where I fell down.  There’s a lot of other shh and k words in my head already & I didn’t make the effort to figure out how this one was special.  As a result, when I was searching my brain for it,  I kept coming up with words like skręcić (to turn) or skakać (to jump).  Similar sounds at some level, but totally unconnected words.

But today when I skimmed my word list for revision, this leaped out at me :

Szczekać = Sz  +  czekać

Czekać is a word I’ve known for ages.  It means to wait.

So now, when my dog is barking and being impatient, I’ll just tell him “Shhhh!  Wait!”

 

Similar words – Świat

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Continuing my theme of clusters of words which are very similar in Polish, which I’ve struggled to get right, here’s another batch which have been plaguing me for a while.

Maybe it’s just my desire to see patterns, but if you think of a general theme where light and spirituality are thought of together and the world is a sacred place, then perhaps there’s a common origin for them.  At least that helps me remember them!

Świat – The world

Światło – Light (n)

Świeca – Candle

Świecić – To shine (v)

Świeży – Fresh (adj)

Święto – Holiday

Święty – Holy (adj)

Świetny – Excellent (adj)

Świetnie – Excellently (adv)

And similar enough to have confused me recently when I heard it :

Śmieci – Rubbish / Garbage (n)

Śmieciarka – Garbage truck

Kosz na śmieci – Rubbish bin

Similar words – Cześć

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Today I was listening to a polish radio interview & doing my best to keep up with the general gist of the report.  My listening comprehension isn’t yet to the level where I can understand even half of what is being said by a native speaker, but I usually understand enough of the words to know roughly what they’re talking about – even if I don’t know what they’re saying about it..

I came away today rather confused though because no matter how many times I played it back, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying in one section and it all came down to a series of words which (to me) sounded practically the same.  So the idea for a new post was born.

Similar words or podobne słowa.

Today – ones which (to me) all sound a bit too close to Cześć to easily differentiate when I hear them spoken quickly in a sentence!  I decided it would be useful for me to write them all down in one place so I can see them together and hopefully learn to tell them apart better (each word is clickable to hear the pronunciation)

Cześć – Hi

Część – Part

Często – Often

Czeski – Czech

Czysty – Clean (adj)

Czynsz – Rent (noun)

Ciężki – Heavy

Cieszę się – To be pleased with

 

How to add Polish to your iPhone/iPad keyboard

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Similar to my earlier post on How to type Polish letters in Windows 10 on your English keyboard, a quick post on how to add Polish to your keyboard on an iPhone/iPad.  It’s very simple and will take you 30 seconds & won’t affect your normal English keyboard at all.

You don’t actually need to do this to type Polish characters, but if you don’t then the auto-correct will keep “fixing” your polish or at least underlining every Polish word as a mistake.

First you need to open up your Settings :

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Then scroll down to find General :

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Scroll down again to find Keyboard :

IMG_0393

 

Select Keyboards at the top :

IMG_0394

 

Add New Keyboard :

IMG_0395

 

Find Polish in the list and select it.  You’re half way there!

Now go back a couple of menus until you’re on the General page again, and this time select Language & Region.

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Choose to Add Language & then find and select Polish (Polski) from the list.

IMG_0407

 

That’s it, you’re done!

Now on your keyboard in whatever application you’re using, there will be a button at the bottom left which lets you swap keyboard languages & auto-correct will be appropriate for whatever language your keyboard is in!

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Keyboard in English with language button highlighted

 

Once you press that language button you will see this instead :

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Keyboard in Polish with auto-correction marks gone

 

When you want to type the special Polish letters like ż, ź, ę, ą, ł, etc, you simply hold down the English letter until the popup menu appears and choose the one you want:

IMG_0403

Hold down English letter to offer Polish letters

 

That’s all there is to it.  You’ll now get Polish auto-corrections/suggestions in your texts & emails when your keyboard is in Polish.

As an added bonus, if you have Dictation switched on (which it is by default), then when your keyboard is in Polish and you press the Microphone symbol (next to the space bar), speak Polish into it and it’ll recognise (hopefully) your Polish and dictate for you in Polish rather than English!

Powodzenia!

Pronouncing numbers – tip

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A quick tip today on how some of the polish numbers are usually pronounced.  This one is direct from my teacher and made a huge difference to the stuttering noises coming out of my mouth when trying to say these words.

The cluster of letters is …ćdz…  You see it in the following numbers :

Pięćdziesiąt (15)

Sześćdziesiąt (16)

Dziewięćdziesiąt (19)

When you try to say these as they’re written, you end up trying to quickly change your mouth from saying CH to DZ.  In Polish however, the ć ends up being silent in these words.

Try saying them again like this :

Pięćdziesiąt

Sześćdziesiąt

Dziewięćdziesiąt

Much easier!

Common words with 1, 2-4 & 5+

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I’ve mentioned in a previous post How many summers do you have? that there is some magic polish grammar that changes when you’re talking about 1 thing, 2-4 things or 5+ things.  It then repeats for 21, 22-24, 25+ then 31, 32-34, 35+ etc.  Though for the sake of completion, I’ll note here that teens (11,12,13,14,15+) all follow the 5+ pattern, so just be aware of that.

Today I thought I’d share some more case of common words which change in the same way.  I’m going to skip going into which case these come from & why today, so just worry about a few new words to learn and when to use them.

(Thanks to Marta, my great polish teacher on skype for helping my get my head around these better in today’s lesson – although any mistakes are purely my own! )

Tysiąc (thousand)

# word example
1 tysiąc tysiąc
2-4 tysiące dwa tysiące
5+ tysięcy pięć tysięcy

Milion (million)

# word example
1 milion jeden milion
2-4 miliony dwa miliony
5+ milionów pięć milionów

Rok (year)

# word example
1 rok jeden rok
2-4 lata dwa lata
5+ lat pięć lat

Godzina (hour)

# word example
1 godzina jedna godzina
2-4 godziny dwie godziny
5+ godzin pięć godzin

Minuta (minute)

# word example
1 minuta jedna minuta
2-4 minuty dwie minuty
5+ minut pięć minut

There are also similar patterns in the basic number words, but it’s not quite as simple to write, so I’ll list them below and highlight, which hopefully will make sense to you with a few examples :

10 – dziesięć

20 – dwadzieścia

30 – trzydziesći

40 – czterdzieści

50 – pięćdzieściąt

60-90  – ……dzieściąt

And the 100’s

100 – sto

200 – dwieście

300 – trzysta

400 – czterysta

500 – pięćset

600-900 – ……set

How to type Polish letters in Windows 10 on your English keyboard

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I’ve spoken to a few people who didn’t realise how simple it is to type Polish letters from your existing keyboard in Windows 10.  In previous versions of Windows it was a bit trickier, but it couldn’t be much simpler in Windows 10.

If you want to do this on your iPhone/iPad, I have a post on how to do it here : How to add Polish to your iPhone/iPad keyboard

Start by pressing the Windows key on your keyboard and typing the word LANGUAGE and you will see this option appear in the menu : “Region & language settings”.  Select it.

1

Next, under Languages, click on “Add a language”

2

On the following screen, select the language you want (Polski / Polish)

3

This may take a few moments to add the language, but then it will return to the previous screen and you should now see Polski in your list of languages.

4

If you want to change Windows so that it can use Polish for things like Menus, Tooltips, MessageBoxes, etc, then go ahead and click it again to download the Language Pack.  However if all you want to do is type in Polish sometimes, then you are now done.

If you look at your Windows taskbar (at the bottom of the screen usually), you will now see that near the clock there is a new bit that says “ENG”.

5

This reflects that currently your keyboard will be typing in English.  There are several ways to change the language you’re typing in.

  1. Click on ENG with your mouse and select the new language from the menu which appears
  2. On your keyboard, hold the Windows Key and press the Space bar.  This will pop the same menu.  Continue to hold the Windows Key and each press of space will change the language.
  3. On your keyboard, hold down the Shift Key and press the ALT Key to the left side of your Space bar.  This doesn’t pop up the menu, it just switches the language.  This is the way I do it as it’s faster and becomes an easy habit.

After any of these ways you should see that your taskbar has changed to look like this.

6

Now you can type Polish letters very easily.  Your letter keys still type the English letters as you would expect, but in order to make the special Polish letters, you need to hold the ALTGR key on the RIGHT side of your Space bar.

Just like holding Shift and pressing a letter changes the letter to the capital version of that letter, the ALTGR key changes it to a Polish form (more or less).

The following combinations now work:

ALTGR + Z = ż

ALTGR + X = ź

ALTGR + S = ś

ALTGR + C = ć

ALTGR + L = ł

ALTGR + O = ó

ALTGR + E = ę

ALTGR + A = ą

ALTGR + N = ń

If you need a capital letter such as a Ą or Ę, you simply hold down the Shift key too as you would normally.

ie:

SHIFT ALTGR + A = Ą

Mostly you could get away with leaving your keyboard in Polish all the time and never notice the difference, but various other keys also change their meaning.  For example, the ” and @ keys are swapped around when using a UK English keyboard.  I imagine if you have a US English or different keyboard you will find some other keys are changed too, so you’ll probably end up hoping back and forth between ENG and PL modes as you need them, but now you can see that’s really easy to do.

I hope this simple article shows that it’s not at all difficult to have your keyboard in a different language.

Challenging word of the day – źdźbło

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I try to write down a handful of new words every day.  I won’t guarantee that I’ll learn them straight away, but at least they’re in my notebook in the appropriate section and I’ll read them out loud a few times, sometimes using this site to try to improve my pronunciation if it’s a tricky one.

Every now and then though, I stumble across a word that makes me ponder how the human tongue is supposed to make a sound like a bumble bee trapped inside a glockenspiel.  So I thought I’d celebrate these words when I find them with a new category of post, my Challenging word of the day.

Today is :

źdźbło

It means a blade or stalk

źdźbło trawy = a blade of grass

You can listen to how it’s meant to sound here