Answering the phone in Polish
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words ever heard over a telephone line. They were: "Come here!" The reply isn't recoded, but I assume it was: "Why should I come there, can't you just tell me over the phone?" A hundred and thirty years later cultures around the world have come up with a multitude of solutions to the problem of what to say when you pick up a ringing phone.
The Italians say "Pronto!" ("Ready!") in a typically hyper-energetic manner, the Spanish say "Dígame" ("Tell me"), which sounds incredibly abrupt to a non-Mediterranean, and the Japanese say "Moshi moshi," which doesn't really mean anything and is therefore guaranteed not to offend anybody.
The Polish "Słucham" ("I'm listening") always sounds suspicious to me. It's what you would say when you're expecting to hear an excuse that you know you're not going to believe. "Tak, słucham" sounds even more skeptical. In an office, Poles will sometimes answer: "Piotr Kowalski z tej strony" ("Piotr Kowalski on this side), which makes it sound like you are communicating with the dead.
The cliché is that the hardest part of learning a foreign language is the ability to recognise humour. I suspect this cliché was invented a long time ago because, in fact, the last thing you really learn in a foreign language is the ability to speak on the phone.
Speaking on the phone is hard enough in your own language. The sound quality is never perfect and you can't see the body language, facial expressions or gestures of the person you are talking to – all vital elements of communication. If speaking a foreign language is like playing a piano with your feet, speaking a foreign language on the phone is like playing a piano with your feet while looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
I avoid answering the phone whenever possible. Nine times out of ten, calls to my landline are from people I don't know trying to sell me things I don't want. But you can never exclude the possibility that it might be the Nobel Prize committee on the other end, so you have to answer it. This is where the problem starts.
If I answer "Słucham," the caller will assume he's talking to a Polish person and attempt to sell me life insurance or PVC windows at 140 words per minute, of which I will understand about 10 percent. I will then reply: "Errrm…" because I would like to explain that I didn't understand what he said, but I also know I don't want life insurance or PVC windows and would like to end the conversation as quickly as possible. Simply hanging up is not an option my polite British upbringing allows me to take.
The alternative is to answer "Hello," in the hope that the caller will realise I'm English and either speak to me in English or give up. Unfortunately this doesn't work either because the English "hello" sounds much to similar to the Polish "halo," which means the conversation goes like this:
Me: Hello?
Caller: Halo?… Dzien dobry?…
Me: Dzien dobry (because it's impossible to resist replying to a 'Dzien dobry' when I hear one)
Caller: Dzien dobry! Piotr Kowalski z tej strony… insurance… PVC windows… etc.
I need a solution that makes it clear to callers that they need to speak to me very slowly. I might install an answering machine with a message saying: "Please speak clearly and slowly – the owner of this telephone has limited intelligence." It might put off the Nobel Prize committee, but on the plus side it will almost certainly cut down on the number of people trying to sell me complex financial instruments.
Jamie Stokes dla Wirtualnej Polski
