POLAND III

Before I started my trip to Poland, I read up about various things to get a better idea of what to expect. Besides the current politics, safety on the streets, especially at night, laws and regulations, such as the prohibition to drink alcohol in public, I also read different things about the Polish language. I kept coming across several articles claiming that Polish is one of the most difficult languages in the world. Some articles even said Polish was more difficult than Chinese, Arabic or even Japanese. I doubted this, but it was clear to me that Polish is at least one of the most difficult European languages. Polish taxi drivers and expats who have been living in Poland for a few years have also confirmed to me several times that Polish is difficult to learn. By the way, the Poles seem to be very happy with this reputation that Polish is a difficult language. I also got the feeling that the Poles are proud of mastering such a difficult language and that foreigners must spend a lot of time learning the language.

Admittedly, this put me off learning Polish (at least a little) before my stay. Of course, I did learn the most important Polish words and phrases, such as hello (dzień dobry), thank you (dziękuję), please (proszę), etc., but for me this is normal when you are in a foreign country and has little to do with learning a language. To find out how difficult Polish is, I asked my Polish flatmate Ania during my first weeks in Warsaw.

Basically, there are four skills to master to speak a language: Reading, writing, speaking and listening. Personally, it would have been enough for me to be able to speak and understand Polish. However, understanding Polish is the first hurdle, because the soft and hard consonants are not so easy to distinguish (ć - cz, ś - sz, ż -ź, dż - dź). This makes the language harder to understand than, for example, Italian, Spanish, English or even German.

Is Polish more difficult to speak than other languages? My flatmate Ania said that speaking is probably the easiest of the four disciplines. Moreover, in polish words are written as they are pronounced, and the stress is almost always on the penultimate syllable. Therefore, speaking Polish is not as difficult as one might think at first glance.

Polish grammar is complicated. Many people have a hard time with the grammatical cases - but they exist in almost all Eastern European languages and in German. You have to take the time to learn them. Even many Poles don't know the grammar and often use an automatic spell checker in everyday life. This is probably why some people consider Polish to be one of the most difficult languages in the world.

However, it was not only the complexity of the language that prevented me from learning Polish, but also the fact that so far there have been very few situations in which Polish would have helped me. On the one hand, the university, and especially the master’s programme, is very international, which means that English is the primarily spoken language in both lectures and outside of class. Only in the university's football training, in which more Polish Bachelor's students took part, was Polish spoken predominantly. This is because most students still have a relatively poor level of English at the beginning of their bachelor's studies. This is because when Poles learn foreign languages at school, they are not encouraged to speak, but on the contrary, they are punished every time they do a mistake. Therefore, even after their school years, they are still afraid to speak and embarrass themselves.

Outside of university, English is also the language I use the most. Since I spend most of my free time with other Erasmus students from different countries, English is the language of choice. However, I would say that I have not been able to improve my English much during my time in Warsaw. Apart from a few technical terms from the lectures, my English has remained at the same level. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that I have spent a lot of time abroad in recent years and have therefore spoken English continuously. On the other hand, I believe that once you have mastered a certain level of a language, you can only improve it if you live in a country where it is also the official language. However, I believe that such a stay abroad consolidates one's language skills once again and that through daily use you can express yourself more confidently in the respective language.

Florian Drogan, January 2022