Interesting remarks on Polish language

[English-test.net]

Dear Torsten,

Thanks for staying in touch. I was really happy and proud to see my "article" published on your site - it's very uplifting to have a hand in so great project. I can see that your site is being developed almost every day and I wish I had more time to take the opportunity to make use of all the materials published there. I hope you will get more and more funs and active visitors and your hard work will be more and more satysfying for all of you.

Thanks for your interesting remarks on Polish language (How good is your Polish?). It's hard for me to be objective about how it sounds for a foreigner but I know that Polish pronounciation and grammar (ie. declination with 7 cases) are vary challenging for the learners. In my school's location there is also a private school of Polish and there are lots of foreigners from all around the world taking the Polish courses. We also had Russians among them but - paradoxically - it's usually hard for Russian people to learn Polish. The two languages are very similar and Russians keep thinking they speak Polish whereas they all the time speak Russian. We can understand them easily but for English or German people it's usually hard to understand Russian speaking Polish.

Anyway a few years ago when the Polish school was set up by my friends most of their students were the university students coming to Poland to study. This has been changing though and now people studying Polish in this school are mostly businessmen who are being sent by various European companies to work here. Consequently they bring their families with them and obviously living and working in Poland make all of them quite motivated to learn Polish. There are also other types of learners such us foreigners who come to Poland to work and then they decide to settle down here getting married to Polish women/or men. Their motivation is very strong as they need to communicate well with their mothers-in-law :))! In addition their progress is fantastic as they really live among Poles and use Polish in everyday life, at home etc. And one special group of learners of Polish language consists of teachers, mainly English and German ones. Speaking of them let me tell you where exactly I work and live.

My school is called "The BEST School of English" and it's located in Krak?w, in the southern Poland. Here's the link to the English language site about Krak?w if you would like to find out more about the city www.krakow.pl/en/ As the school's name says we teach English only and it's been 6 years now since we've been on the market. We're are obviously not the biggest school in Krak?w and usually we employ 2-3 native speaker teachers among whom there's our DOS. The other teachers are non- native speakers, Poles. Our native speakers usually come from England and USA although occasionally we employed some Australian or Irish teachers. They usually don't speak any Polish when they come to work with us but one-year free course of Polish is always a standard part of their contracts. We encourage our teachers to learn Polish as they also work with the Polish staff and sometimes they've got to deal with our customers out of the classroom ie. when meeting our YL's parents asking about their kids' progress.

Why do they choose Poland as a place of living and work? Many of them had visited Poland before and they liked the country and people who live here, lots of them especially loved Krak?w. Most of them stay here for a year or two and it seems to be a kind of interesting experience for them to live here for a while - unless they settle down here with the new families... In addition I think Poland is a great market for English teachers right now, especially with the perspective of Poland's access to EU. Every year new schools of English are being set up so obviously there's quite a big demand for English teachers. Of course there is a disadvantage of this trend as for some English speaking people it looks like teaching English here is an easy way of earning a living - and there is unfortunately a number of schools which employ non-qualified staff. But that's another story.

I wonder how it looks like in Germany. Is English still so popular among German people? I've got a friend in Berlin (she used to be our DOS for a year) who says that there's especially big demand for Business English there. Are there many schools of English in Leipzig? Do they focus on teaching Business English?

At BEST we're getting ready to the September enrolment for our next school year courses right now. We're very excited but also - as always this time of the year - quite nervous because there's a huge competition among schools of English. However we hope that our high quality service will let us teach more students this year.

Torsten, keep up your good job with your web site. Let's stay in touch.
Pozdrowienia z Krakowa,
Aneta

[S. Becker]

I am married to a Pole and was also inspired to learn some Polish. It does help one to get around and it is a pleasure to be able to understand family members - even just on a basic level. At first, it was difficult to pronounce so many words with consonants, but now I think it is the easiest part of the language. Polish is a phonetic language, unlike English. The horrible difficulties lie in the cases and the declinations thereof, but if you can speak a language with the declination system and articles it makes sense.
Russian is apparently more difficult than Polish (more cases) so I cannot see why Russians would experience difficulties learning Polish other than vocab and pronunciation.