Free your English!
I admit I should speak Polish better than I do. Unfortunately, when you try to teach one of the world's most difficult languages to one of the world's worst language learners you end up with the kind of man who tries to buy "szynka piwa" instead of "skrzynkę piwa." I need to ask people questions in English sometimes—it's best for everybody's sanity.
21.01.2011 | aktual.: 21.01.2011 10:57
Fortunately, a lot of Poles are very smart and speak English well. Unfortunately, a lot of these smart Poles won't speak to me in English—not because they are cruel, but because they are too afraid somebody is going to laugh at them for making a mistake. Sometimes they will whisper to me in English, but only if there are no other people within 50 metres and they have performed an electronic sweep for listening devices first. It's easier to do multimillion-dollar cocaine deals than it is to get some people to tell me what they did on the weekend.
The fear of being revealed as slightly less than perfect in English seems to cripple some people. I've seen Poles, who I know speak English well, become dumbstruck when asked for directions in English by a stranger. They point and babble in Polish and send the tourist in completely the wrong direction rather than risk being judged.
Some years ago I asked a Polish person on the street where the nearest post office was. She looked around carefully to check that nobody was listening and gave me directions in almost perfect English. I thanked her, sent my postcard and went home. Late that night, a private detective knocked at my door, passed me a plain brown envelope and disappeared into the night. Inside was a printed letter from the stranger on the street apologising profusely for having said "turn left on the corner" instead of "turn left at the corner." It was notarised by a sworn translator.
By far the most perplexing example of this phenomenon is the stealth English-speaker. These are the people claim to speak no English when you ask them, then listen to you struggle through a long explanation of a complex administrative problem in Polish before answering you in proficiency-level English without a stutter. Is there a law that bank and government employees are only allowed to speak English after their interlocutor has said "Mam próbę" instead of "Mam prośbę" three times?
The problem seems to be a Polish belief that you don't really speak a language unless you are indistinguishable from a native speaker. This is an admirable ambition but, in the case of English, one that is impossible to achieve. English is the official language of 53 countries—which one do you want to sound like?
A lot of Poles expect English people to be protective and fussy about the way people speak the language that is named after us, but the complete opposite is the truth. English people grow up hearing our language spoken in dozens of different ways, all of them native, and in hundreds of different accents. There are people in my own country I find harder to understand than Poles speaking English. Interesting fact: Polish, like French, Russian and Chinese, is regulated by an official body—in the case of Polish it's the Polish Language Council. Not only is there no such official body for English, it's impossible to see how there could be one. Anybody can do anything they like with English, we don't care are we’re not judging you.
Jamie Stokes
