I have studied abroad in Poland, and when I talk about my experience there, I am often asked what language is spoken there. I feel like saying, "What kind of obvious question are you asking? It's Poland, so of course it's Polish!!" However, it is true that Japanese people who don't know much about Poland are not usually aware that a language called Polish exists. It's sad. But this is the reality. I think that there are many people around the world, not just Japanese people, who do not really understand the difference between Poland and Portugal or Holland (the Netherlands). So this time I would like to introduce Polish, the official language of the Republic of Poland.
Basic information of Polish
Language family: Indo-European, Slavic, West Slavic
Text: Latin (Polish alphabet)
Number of native speakers: Approximately 50 million
The language is Slavic
Polish is a member of the Slavic language family of Indo-European languages. The most famous Slavic language is Russian, so Polish can be said to be close to Russian. However, the two languages are not similar enough to be able to understand each other even if they are spoken in each other's languages, and the characters are different. This is because, although both are Slavic languages, Russian belongs to the group called East Slavic, while Polish belongs to a different group of Slavic languages called West Slavic. In addition to Polish, Czech and Slovak are also in the same West Slavic language family, and when you get close to each other, you can understand what they are saying. However, if you are careless because they are similar, the meanings can be completely different even if the pronunciation is the same. In Polish, the word "szukać" means "search," but in Czech, the same pronunciation "šukat" means "fuck," or "have sex," so be especially careful when looking for something in Czech.
Characteristics of Slavic languages
① Nouns have gender
This is not a feature of Slavic languages, but rather a feature seen in Indo-European languages such as German and French, but nouns have gender. Polish nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, and the rules for case declension (described below) and for verb and adjective conjugations in the same sentence change depending on the gender of the noun. Due to this combination of gender and person, there are as many as 13 conjugations for the past tense of verbs in Polish. Hearing this makes English seem very easy.
②There is a case declension.
Slavic nouns have a case, and by changing this case, they function like Japanese particles. For example, "Polish women" is "Polka", but when saying "Polish people", it becomes Polkę (strictly speaking, the case of the object is determined by the verb, so the case does not directly correspond to the Japanese particle). There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, embodied, instrumental, prepositional, and vocative. If you don't understand this case change, you can't even look up a dictionary properly. It takes time to accept the concept that this noun changes in the first place. For example, if you change the case of "Fukuoka", it becomes "Fukuoka", "Fukuoki", "Fukuoze", "Fukuoken", "Fukuokon", "Fukuoze", and "Fukuoko", but they all mean "Fukuoka". It's crazy.
③There are two types of verbs
There are two types of verbs in Slavic: imperfective and perfective. Imperfective verbs are mainly used for ongoing actions or habitually repeated actions, while perfective verbs, as the name suggests, are used to express actions that have already been completed or are about to be completed. For example, the verb "buy" is "Kupuję kawę każdego ranka" when saying "I buy coffee every morning" using the imperfective "kupować", but "I bought a book yesterday" is "Kupiłem książkę wczoraj" using the perfective "kupić". However, even if you give example sentences like this, each word has already changed its form, so you probably won't understand the meaning even if it is explained like this. That is a normal reaction. This is Slavic and this is Polish.
The characters are in the Latin alphabet, just like English.
Polish uses the Latin alphabet, the same as English. This is the only relief for Polish language learners. However, this is not something you can immediately feel at ease with in Polish. As I have already written in the example sentence, it is difficult to express the sounds of Polish with only the same number of letters as English, so Polish has its own letters (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ż, ź). Although it is also a Slavic language, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. This is due to differences in religion, with Catholic countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic using the Latin alphabet and Orthodox countries such as Russia and Serbia using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Approximately 50 million native speakers
Poland has a population of about 38 million, and almost all of them speak Polish as their native language. Historically, many Poles have also emigrated to other countries, with the number of Polish speakers being about 12 million. This means that there are about 50 million native speakers of Polish. This is about half the number of German speakers, but about twice the number of Dutch speakers, making Polish one of the top 10 languages in Europe in terms of number of native speakers. However, it is difficult to learn, and English is relatively well spoken in Poland, so the number of people learning Polish as a second language is probably quite small. However, this is why Polish people are very happy if you speak even a little Polish to them, so if you have the opportunity to go to Poland in the future, please do your best to at least say hello.
By the way, a commonly used greeting is "hello."Dzień dobry"(Jendobri), 'Thank you.'"Dziękuję" (Jen Kuo Yen), but they sound similar and are often confused at first, so care should be taken.
As you can see, Polish is one of the most difficult languages to learn, but if you have even the slightest interest in it, I would be very happy if you would study it even a little.
Wszystko dobrego! Trzymaj się!! Do widzenia!!!
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