Archive for 'Vocabulary'
Good Relationships Posted by Anna on Dec 17, 2008
Relationships are hard. In any language. But in Polish they are even harder. Take the word “relationship,” for example. We all know what it means in English. It’s a fairly straightforward word, even if relationships themselves are not. But such is life… I have relationships with many people. Some are personal, some are less personal…
Friends Will Be Friends Posted by Anna on Dec 15, 2008
Basia’s comment about the whole przyjaciółka/koleżanka/relationship thing made me think. And she’s right, it IS a very nuanced thing, indeed. In English I refer to approximately 1395 people as my “friends.” Yet, when talking to a Pole, about 1390 of those people are not “friends” (przyjaciółki) but “koleżanki/koledzy” or “znajome/znajomi” or “kumpelki/kumple” and so on…
Meldunek Posted by Anna on Dec 11, 2008
I don’t remember if I’ve already told you this but I’ve been trying to establish myself in Poland. You know, doing stuff like getting a Polish address (meldunek), ID card (dowód osobisty) and all that bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. And compared to other countries, I have to say that the Polish system is quite complicated. The biggest…
Dzień Dziękczynienia – Thanksgiving Posted by Anna on Nov 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends! To those of you who are in Poland, are you doing anything special? Are you preparing the whole nine yards of turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and pies and ham and green beans and corn and freshly baked rolls? And speaking of pies, how would you translate “pie”…
Polish in the Kitchen Posted by Anna on Nov 22, 2008
Last week I went food shopping with my dad. We went to one of the Carrefours in Gdańsk. Don’t ask me which one, I don’t know, I have absolutely no sense of direction. Anyway, while walking around that Carrefour and looking for balsamic vinegar (ocet balsamiczny), I ended up in their “foreign foods” section. And…
Which Polish Grammar Book? Posted by Anna on Nov 17, 2008
I really don’t understand why it’s so hard to find a grammar book. A Polish grammar book, that is. In English. I spent the entire weekend schlepping from one bookstore to another, sometimes in the rain, and the only result was sore feet. My sore feet, that is. I went to normal bookstores and to…
Stary Piernik and Other Expressions, part 1 Posted by Anna on Nov 8, 2008
John H. came up with an excellent suggestion for a blog post and I gotta say that neither I nor my friends have ever had so much fun gathering material and doing “linguistic” research. Some of those expressions – I even forgot they existed. Like “stary piernik” for example. When translated literally, it becomes “old…