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Tag Archives: Vocabulary

It’s Almost Christmas! Posted by on Dec 21, 2008

How’s your Christmas shopping coming along? I haven’t even started mine, to be honest. And if someone asks me why, I’m going to tell them that I’m turning Greek orthodox this year. Speaking of which, these guys have it so easy – everything is on sale for THEIR xmas. Not fair, so not fair… And…

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Good Relationships Posted by 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…

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Friends Will Be Friends Posted by 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…

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Meldunek Posted by 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…

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Dzień Dziękczynienia – Thanksgiving Posted by 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”…

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Polish in the Kitchen Posted by 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…

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Stary Piernik and Other Expressions, part 1 Posted by 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…

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