A question for Mosteque

[Rich7]

How are you doing pal? I just found out you're from Poland.
Reading some topics on grammar in another forum I came across a discussion about "articles" where a guy wrote something like "Polish don't take articles," how so? can you instruct me in it.

P.S. try giving examples in English if possible.

Thanks........

[Mosteque]

hmmmm
It's quite simple, we poles don't use articles, we don't say: a book, a dog, the earth, the moon..... we just say, 'this is ball, this is dog, look at moon......
that's why we have a lot of porblems with using articles correctly. After a while, you start to use them instinctively but still a lot of them is wrong:D
I hope you understand what i mean.

The same is with tenses. We have only 3 tenses in polish: past, present and future, so at the beginning of learning english we are so confused and find englihs very difficult. Actually this is the english that is taught in school - to use english tenses correctly.

But polish is considered as one of the hardest languages on earth, why you may ask. Because our grammar is very complicated. I can't explain you why, but that's the truth and sometimes even we poles have problems with our mother tongue;)
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obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit

[Rich7]

Harder than spanish I don't think so, you do'n t have many structures, tenses, articles; we on the contrary have many.

Anyway thanks for the explanation.

[Rosko1234]

"polish is considered as one of the hardest languages on earth"

In Bulgaria we are taught that Bulgarian is "one of the hardest languages to learn".

I think that this is part of the way Soviet societies percieve themselves. It is a question of national pride to have the most difficult language or to have the most soliders killed in a battle and things like that. So I guess that in both societies we have the same believes.

Yet if we look at what rich7, who is from Venezuella, is saying "Harder than spanish I don't think so, you do'n t have many structures, tenses, articles; we on the contrary have many." It may be that all countries percieve that their language is the hardest to learn.

Personally I think that learning a language is culturally relative. To a person whose language culture is similar to the language culture of another person it may be easier to learn the language. For an example, it may be easier for me to learn Polish than it is to learn Chinese. It also may be that it is easier for me to learn Spanish than it is to learn a native American language.

So based on this premise and in the spirit of this discussion I am going to say that the hardest languages to learn are Chinese and native American. That is, two language who are probably as distant from Bulgarian as possible.

[Jailbird]

And please don`t forget about Russian!!! It`s not a simple language either!!! It`s very complicated because there`re too many rules and many exceptions from the rules...It`s not easy, really)))
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Your Jailbird

[Karina]

In polish for example adjectives have gender .... 8)

[Mosteque]

Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn and this is the fact born out by many experts at this topic.
As to polish or bulgarian... yes Rosko, you might be quite right:)
i'd like to show you sth:
First some explanations: I'm sure you won't be able to see polish fonts (you will see them as strange marks) so i'll make a list of them
ę - kind of E with an accent
ą - kind of A with an accent
ł - kind of L with an accent

now 'this is a 'ball'
polish : to jest (this is) piłka

i'm throwing a ball
polish: rzucam (i'm throwing) piłkę

i was hit with a ball
polish: zostalem uderzony(i was hit with) piłką

what's written on this ball
polish: co jest napisane na tej(what's written on this) piłce

we have balls ( yea, especially men ;):D
polish: my mamy (we have) piłki

we were hit with balls
polish: zostalismy uderzeni(we were hit with) piłkami

we have no balls (shit happens as they say)
polish: my nie mamy (we have no) piłek

so as you see for two forms of a noun in english we have SEVEN in polish. Moreover there is a lot of nouns that conjugate completely other way.

Now let’s take a simple verb ‘ TO GO ‘ into consideration
ś – kind of S with an accent
ć – kind of C with an accent
Polish infinitive : iść

I/you/we/they go
She/he/it goes

Polish (brace yourself):
Ja (I) idę
Ty(you) idziesz
On/ona/ono (he/she/it) idzie
My(we) idziemy
Wy(you) idziecie
Oni(they) idą

I/you/she/he/it/we/you/they went/...have/has gone

Polish:
Ja(I) poszedłem
Ty(you) poszedłeś
On(he) poszedł
Ona(she) poszła
Ono(it) poszło
My(we) poszliśmy
Wy(you) poszliście
Oni(they) poszli
One(they but talking about two girls) poszły

Now in English you have two forms in present tenses and in polish we have SIX of them
In past tenses you have two forms and we have NINE of them. If a verb is irregular(and most of polish verbs are) there is no rule how they conjugate and you have to learn each and every by heart.

There is more peculiarities in polish:
When a girl says: I went in polish she says : ja poszłam
But when a boy says it, he says: ja poszedłem

Do you see what I meant?? Slovak languages are rather hard to learn and considerably and objectively harder to learn than English for example. I know English and i know polish so i’m able to judge it. I don’t know whether we may apply this to Spanish for example.
English and German have the same stem – Latin. So it’s easier for both nations to learn each other’s language, at least much easier than for me or a Russian. On the other hand it’s much easier for me to learn Russian than for an average English or American. Of course every single language has its idioms, phrasal verbs and stuff like that so we don’t have to broach this side of the problem.
Do you get my point?
P.S da/mn my fingers are aching:D I hope at least one person reads this:D
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obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit

[Sunny]

:D Yes, I just read what you wrote!

I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to post all this, so first of all: Thank you!

Polish seems to be quite difficult to learn indeed!
Obviously, there are too many different forms of a word - either noun or verb - to memorize. Most of the native speakers might not notice this, but people who learn other languages, too, recognize this problem.
It is the same with Greek: too many rules, too many different conjugations.
And it is the same with Latin: I am learning it at the moment because I need it for my studies and I have to say: it is extremely confusing! Actually, it is the most structured language and the language with the most rules I have got in touch with.
It is amazing how different languages are.

[Karina]

Mosteque..what an essay you wrote ... :lol:

[Dave]

[Karina]

quite interesting.. :)