Gack!

[fuzzyred]

My poor English brain does not like Polish. I just finished the lesson on determiners, and there are so many variations and interpretations on the words for "all, every, somebody, nobody, everybody, everything, something". Makes translation hard and picking out the pattern even harder. Plus, the word base word for all is "wszyscy". What the fuck even, Polish????

And after that, I started the lesson on numbers, which is ok, BUT Polish is a language that changes the ending of ALL their words based on grammatical case AND gender AND singular/plural. EVEN NUMBERS! So, "one" isn't just "jeden", it can be "jedna" (for feminine things) or "jedno" (for neuter things). And the word for two had even more variations.

I think my poor brain is melting...

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

Oh my god. That would break my brain.

[fuzzyred]

Oh yeah. It's definitely very different from English, and is why I can only sometimes practice the Polish. Other times, I just don't have the energy to deal with something so vastly different than what I already know. At some point I really should try to look up a guide to Polish grammar, since Duolingo tends to be spotty in that regard. It might make learning some of the rules and variations easier.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Out of sheer curiosity, what made you decide to pick up learning Polish?

[fuzzyred]

My grandfather is Polish, and even though I've never really heard him speak it, my dad talks about our Polish heritage a lot and he wishes he could speak it. So since I've always liked languages and wanted to learn more, I thought I'd start with something that had family history.

Although, the further I go in Polish, the stranger the words look *pfffffff* <-- the sound of my brain overheating and exploding XD I still really want to learn it, but it may take much more time and practice. Sometimes I swear I can *feel* my brain bending and changing.

Also, a random side note: I watched "Down to Earth" on the recommendation of my sister, a show where Zac Efron and a friend go to various countries for various reasons. Their first stop was Iceland, and while the scenery was beautiful and their renewable energy is mind blowing, I was disappointed not to hear anyone speaking Icelandic.

[ex_flameandsong751]

Oh, that's cool! I started learning Norwegian for similar reasons - Mormor (my maternal grandmother) was born in Norway, so there's family history involved (plus two of my verses are partially set in Norway).

Yes, the lack of Icelandic is disappointing. Although, virtually all Icelanders speak English. They start teaching it in school at a very young age, so most Icelanders are exceptionally fluent in English. (A lot of them also speak a third language, usually Danish or Norwegian.)

I can imagine Polish would bend your brain. Just the few Polish words I've been exposed to I'm like "wh- what?" and I say this as someone fairly used to Icelandic.

[fuzzyred]

Ah, that is cool :)

Ya, although it sort of made sense in the grand scheme of things. They were going mostly to look at the energy resources and some of the hot springs, and the were only interacting with a few people at a time. There weren't really anywhere that had a lot of Icelandic people all together, and everyone they spoke too had really good English, with faint but interesting accents (some of them sounded almost Gaelic to me.) Second languages are much easier at young ages.

Ya... Polish is very liberal in its use of z's and w's and generally makes sounds English doesn't. I do, however, suspect that Icelandic would bend my brain too, if I ever tried to learn it. (English is my first language, and I learned French throughout grade school and high school.)

[ex_flameandsong751]

Oh yes, Icelandic accents are very interesting. My OC Sören has one (though his English is very good, and he lives outside of Iceland in most of the multiverse). He sounds kind of like a male version of this (it's a video of Björk speaking).

Icelandic is another brain-bending language! It's a beautiful language but also very complicated compared to the other Scandinavian languages like Norwegian and Swedish and Danish. It's fascinating to me though to see cognates between English and the other Germanic languages, as well as the cognates between the Scandinavian languages and other language families, like "jeg" (for "I" in Norwegian) and "Ég" (for "I" in Icelandic) is related to "ego" in Latin.

All the "w" and "z"s in Polish is intimidating to an English speaker, yes. Welsh is another one of those languages that terrifies me and makes very liberal use of the letter w. :P

[fuzzyred]

That is indeed a very interesting accent. I like her voice :)

It looks like it, from the few Icelandic names I've seen! It is always interesting to see which words are related to each other, and what carries over from one language to another; and what is different, of course!

Add in the "c"s, and you get some very strange sounds in Polish, and more than one word that leaves my tongue tied and me scratching my head. XD Maybe it's the "w"s that make a language intimidating? ;D

[lithophiles]

Just remember, w and y are verbs in Welsh! That... might make it less intimidating, I dunno. (I'm not as sure about all the consonant clusters in Polish except that "sz" is sort of a "sh" sound. Slavic languages tend to be filled with a lot of sh and ch sounds, at least to my perception)

The Latin connection is really interesting. Usually I would expect to see more Germanic cognates in Scandinavian languages, but I'm probably talking out my butt about that.

-Helain

[ex_flameandsong751]

*waves hi*

There are actually a lot of Germanic cognates in Scandinavian languages, yes. I'm reverse engineering - usually people start with something like German, then one of the modern Nordic languages like Danish or Norwegian, *then* Icelandic if they get that far, and I went totally ass-backwards with Icelandic first, then Norwegian. 😂 And while Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than it is to the modern Scandinavian languages, there are still enough cognates where I was like "hey, I know that word, it's just spelled a little differently" in my Norwegian lessons. 😁

But the Latin influence is pretty interesting. And I actually didn't know "w" and "y" are verbs in Welsh! But then, I know next to nothing about Welsh except a lot of "ll" and "w".

[lithophiles]

Oops, I am a derp. I meant to say "they're vowels in Welsh," but our brain was like "Verbs? Vowels? Eh, they both start with V." But yeah, the W is sort of like an "oo" noise, with both short and long versions. (We do some conlanging and choosing your orthography can definitely be interesting, especially if you have sounds that don't exist in your native language.)

[ex_flameandsong751]

It's OK! My brain does things like that too. "They both start with that letter..." XD

I admire people who conlang.

[lithophiles]

Our conlang is a mess, haha. It's meant to be very different from anything Indo-European, but we started out by just kind of throwing stuff together to see what stuck. (The reason we decided to make it different wasn't because we wanted prestige or anything; it was just what we felt drawn to. When we took Spanish and Latin in school, we always liked the verbs that let you use one word to say what would take several words in English. There was just kind of a flow to it that our brain liked. So when we knew enough about agglutination and noun incorporation to try them, we immediately wanted to try to work with them in our conlang.)

-Istevia

[ex_flameandsong751]

we always liked the verbs that let you use one word to say what would take several words in English

Yes, there is an elegance to that. I also geek out on words that express sentiments the English language doesn't really have words for, like the Portuguese saudade, Finnish sisu, etc.

[fuzzyred]

Very interesting. I did not know "w" and "y" were vowels in Welsh. That probably makes things make a little more sense and trying to read words. XD

[fuzzyred]

There are a lot "sh" and "ch" sounds in Polish, and a lot of "jjuuuu" sounds (that happens to be my attempt at the "z" sound that is found in "treasure" in English.) It's not so bad once you get used to it, because Polish seems to be more phonetic than English.

hey, this is Amorpha again. hope you don't mind us posting, we find languages really interesting

[lithophiles]

We've had similar curiosities about Irish. No one in our birth family has spoken it for generations, but part of our family has always made a big deal out of being Irish, so we grew up with that (although the Irishness seemed to be expressed mostly through kitsch and popular books. We didn't even get folktales, geez.) And Irish orthography is... very strange, relative to English orthography. We've been told it's more regular than English once you memorize it, but the problem is memorizing it first.

Re: hey, this is Amorpha again. hope you don't mind us posting, we find languages really interesting

[fuzzyred]

Commenting is always good! I find languages really interesting too. I have just recently started looking at Irish and it does seem very different than English. Too bad you didn't get any folktales, that sounds like it would have been really interesting.

[warriorsavant]

Sympathy!
That's the sort of thing that native speakers take for granted and feels makes complete sense as well as adding texture to the language, whereas everyone else basically says WTF, why are you adding meaningless structure to your language.

[fuzzyred]

I like the unique verb endings, because it means you can drop the pronoun and still have a cohesive sentence, though it does take getting used to. The different endings for grammatical case... I can see the logic behind it, but I do feel it is unnecessary. It might also be easier to follow if English was a language that did the same thing. It's harder to remember what the "dative case" or "accusative case" is, when English makes no distinction (or indeed any mention) between them.

[technoshaman]

Can there be one two, such that "two" is singular?

[fuzzyred]

I don't believe so. "Two" is always plural in Polish I believe, and even if it doesn't have more variations than "one", I feel that more of them were *shown* at least.