Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Jun 13, 2019 6:45 pm

StringerBell wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I’d also like to find some thorough pronunciation training materials. So, I welcome suggestions on how to approach Polish if any of you have experience learning it.


I'm copying the info below from PP's log since you asked about pronunciation help.

Polish Paralysis wrote:One more thing that I have ommitted from the discussion but which is absolutely critical in my opinion for people wishing to learn Polish. Pronunciation! I am no linguist but I feel as if I am almost half way to being a self-taught one as a result of my struggles with Polish pronunciation. Being able to pronounce words is immensely important in helping a person remember them because there is always an element of subvocalisation in the process of remembering.

By far the best two resources that I came across for this were:
http://polfon.upol.cz/index.php?page=home
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuOFZ ... deKFldaLGA (which I used to learn how to palatalise consonants.


On my Polish resources page, I have a link to a free Polish audio phrasebook course - you can download the mp3 files for free and have them either just in Polish, or first Polish, then English. If you are looking to loop some basic phrases and sentences, this might be of use to you.

Thanks! I read both your logs, so I was aware of that, but what I'm really looking for is something like the phonology sections of the FSI courses. I suppose I'll just have to make do though. My ideal method is to use Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainer (there isn't one for Polish :( though) while checking the descriptions of mouth placement on the Wikipedia page for each IPA symbol and then use some phonology course/section from FSI, but there aren't many languages I can do that with. Fortunately I can usually manage to get most sounds close enough not to annoy the natives too much anyway.
Polish Paralysis wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I’m still looking for some other Polish materials that are easier for starting out with. I like Assimil, but I need something more than that, something that will feed me the grammar in a logical order. Assimil just sort of hints at things. I’d also like to find some thorough pronunciation training materials. So, I welcome suggestions on how to approach Polish if any of you have experience learning it.


Check out the log I've just created as well as StringerBell's log where he has a wealth of resources listed.

If you're looking for grammar in a logical order you might like something along the lines of Beginning Polish by Alexander Schenker whose book uses the audiolingual approach. It is slightly outdated though.

Thanks. I'll look into that. I love the audiolingual method when it's done well and I don't mind old materials.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Polish Paralysis » Thu Jun 13, 2019 7:13 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:My ideal method is to use Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainer (there isn't one for Polish though) while checking the descriptions of mouth placement on the Wikipedia page for each IPA symbol and then use some phonology course/section from FSI, but there aren't many languages I can do that with.


I also use the same method. I used Gabriel Wyner's one for Russian as a good portion of the phonology is the same in Polish. The major difficulty in the Polish pronunciation are separating the sz/cz sounds from the ś and ć sounds as well as palatalization in general if you are not a speaker of a Slavic language. I have spent a lot of time looking for resources and they are greatly lacking. Your best bet in my opinion are to use the those two websites together with wikipedia. The one website is literally more or less an unanimated version of a Gabriel Wyner tutorial and the other is a more boring version of one where you have to look up one sound at a time.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jun 28, 2019 9:11 am

Things have been a bit hectic since I got back. Various activities and organizations have had parties and things to mark that they were over for the summer, plus I had a bunch of appointments, so I’ve been a bit busier than I’d planned for. In addition, I caught a cold in Bratislava and that took it’s time to get better. One of the activities that is officially over for the summer, the evening Norwegian training, we have decided to continue with on an unofficial basis. We can’t use the library since it closes at 16:00 during the summer, but there are a bunch of tables in another part of the culture-house where we can sit and talk, so we’ve been doing that. A couple of people asked me if we could also meet up to speak in English and I agreed, so we might be starting up “English training” in a similar manner. However, I haven’t heard back from them, so I don’t know yet when or if it will happen. I wish there were some groups for some of the languages I’m learning. That would be loads of fun.

While most of Europe is suffering a blistering heatwave, we’ve barely cracked double digits some days, so it’s very comfortable weather for studying, I just have to get on with it. I had a pretty good routine started, but it keeps getting interrupted by other activities, appointments that take far too much time, illness and my recurring exhaustion. I think most of the start-of-summer parties are over and I only have one more appointment left – to get new eye-glasses (I need progressive lenses and they cost about three times what my old glasses cost. Getting old is expensive!) – so the only things likely to interrupt my studies now are my own exhaustion and laziness.

Japanese:
Since the introduction of Polish, Japanese has been suffering some neglect. I don’t get to it every day anymore. Part of that has been because of appointments and parties though, so it might get better. I’ve hardly done any new cards in Anki since I came back and some days, I even miss my reviews. I think I might also be suffering a bit of Anki-burnout, so I should probably try to just keep up the reviews and not worry about new cards for a while. Maybe I should try to get back to watching Polar Bear Café to reignite my enthusiasm. Japanese is the one language that always seems to break me. I love it, but I tend to get stuck in the study routine and forget that I love it. What I need is a good dose of enjoyable TV, like I get with Spanish, but I have trouble finding TV shows I like, that are available here and that I can turn off the subtitles on. Maybe I should look a little harder. I haven’t even looked lately. I really enjoyed watching Polar Bear Café on Animelon because I could have English or Japanese or no subs as I wished, but then it stopped working for me. :(

Polish
I’ve not got in nearly as much Peppa Pig as I’d hoped. Polish is also suffering from me having too much else to do. I’ve only done about four hours so far. Even so, I’ve noticed a big difference. At first, Polish seemed very shushy and mumbly, but now I’m much more able to distinguish the sounds and even recognize words. Sometimes I can parse several sentences in a row if they are short. I wouldn’t say that I know all the words in those sentences, but that I can recognize what they must be. I have also learned a few words and phrases, but mostly to recognize them rather than to produce them. I keep feeling like I’ve almost got a few cases figured out too, but then I get confused again. I assume Polish has three genders and an animate/inanimate distinction in the masculine, and possibly some irregularities, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that cases are a little hard to figure out just from Peppa Pig. I’ll keep going with just Peppa for a while, but then I think I’d like to add in some textbook work. I think that will really speed things up. I actually like Peppa Pig a lot, but I’ve found that the official channels are not always that good. It’s not just the Polish one, because I’ve tested a few others too. For some reason, they frequently cut up the episodes and then paste them together again. So, you get two minutes from one episode, then two minutes from another. Why would anyone do that?! The episodes are only five minutes long to begin with and it makes it very confusing when they are chopped up. It doesn’t always help to look for videos that claim to be complete episodes either. Sometimes they lie! I found some unofficial channels though, so I might just stick to those for a while rather than trying to search through a mass of videos looking for one that actually has complete episodes.

YouTube has apparently noticed that I’m learning Polish due to my watching Peppa Pig and subscribing to several Polish learning channels for later use. It also knows I like telenovelas since I watch one almost every day in Spanish. And it just put two and two together and now I’m being inundated in recommendations for Polish telenovelas or soaps or something. So, it looks like Polish has the potential to be lots of fun once I get to a level where I can enjoy native media.

German
I’m still continuing to work my way through an A2 level textbook. I don’t think I’ll manage to squeeze in more than one unit per week, though I’d had hopes to go a little faster. I could do it if I didn’t write out all the exercises, but then I wouldn’t get as much out of it. I find writing everything out longhand really improves my learning. A2 is far below my actual level, but at the same time, I feel I need to really drill the basics and overlearn them to overcome all my doubts and uncertainties, and to keep myself from relying too much on Norwegian. I’ve read a bit more of my novel, but that’s going pretty slowly. It’s a teensy bit too hard. Some parts are no problem at all and some bits are just a little challenging, but then there are bits where the main character is talking to some working-class people, or worse, eavesdropping on them, and then the dialogues are written in dialect and I struggle with those parts. If he’s eavesdropping, it means both sides of the conversation are in dialect and then I sometimes get confused. I’m nearly halfway though, so I think I’ll try to finish and then maybe choose something easier for my next book – either another Agatha Christie translation or perhaps a Michael Ende children’s book.

I also got distracted by a different novel, in Norwegian, but I’m finished that now. If anyone is learning Swedish, though, and likes Agatha Christie style mysteries, I would really like to recommend the Swedish author, Maria Lang. She’s obviously been translated to Norwegian and maybe a few other languages, so maybe you can enjoy her works even if you aren’t learning Swedish.

Spanish
After a lot of procrastination, I finally bought a C1 textbook. It should come early next week. I’m looking forward to getting started on it. I haven’t really seriously studied Spanish in ages and now I’m feeling very enthusiastic about the next step. I think all my TV watching and novel reading has paid off and I’ve learned a lot from it, but I haven’t done enough production or grammar study lately and now when I try to talk or write, although I can manage pretty well, I find a lot of doubts creep in. I start questioning whether I’m using the right word or the right tense and mood. I’m also just very eager to improve and get over that hump from “mostly pretty fluent” to “sounds reasonably intelligent”.

Yesterday, I had a Skype language exchange with someone I met at the Gathering. Generally speaking, you don’t meet a lot of people at the Gathering that are interested in working on their English, but I was very lucky to meet a young Spanish woman who is still working on her English and we decided to practice together. It went pretty well considering I’ve barely used Spanish other than passively for a month or so. I seemed to manage OK, but every time I noticed I was speaking Spanish, I would suddenly forget the entire language. I need to work on that a bit. I suppose it will never be perfect since I still have that problem sometimes in Norwegian, but it could be better.
Last edited by Brun Ugle on Fri Jun 28, 2019 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby StringerBell » Fri Jun 28, 2019 12:31 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:YouTube has apparently noticed that I’m learning Polish due to my watching Peppa Pig and subscribing to several Polish learning channels for later use. It also knows I like telenovelas since I watch one almost every day in Spanish. And it just put two and two together and now I’m being inundated in recommendations for Polish telenovelas or soaps or something.


Would you mind sharing some of the names of these recommended shows? I'm currently watching shows using vod.tv.pl, but it's geoblocked, so if they ever decide to ban VPNs, I'll be screwed (I'd gladly pay them, if the option existed). I should collect some resources elsewhere in the event this happens. I don't remember YT ever suggesting any actual Polish shows to me, but maybe that's because I never subscribed to telenovelas in other languages.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jun 28, 2019 1:31 pm

StringerBell wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:YouTube has apparently noticed that I’m learning Polish due to my watching Peppa Pig and subscribing to several Polish learning channels for later use. It also knows I like telenovelas since I watch one almost every day in Spanish. And it just put two and two together and now I’m being inundated in recommendations for Polish telenovelas or soaps or something.


Would you mind sharing some of the names of these recommended shows? I'm currently watching shows using vod.tv.pl, but it's geoblocked, so if they ever decide to ban VPNs, I'll be screwed (I'd gladly pay them, if the option existed). I should collect some resources elsewhere in the event this happens. I don't remember YT ever suggesting any actual Polish shows to me, but maybe that's because I never subscribed to telenovelas in other languages.

At the moment, I have multiple episodes of these two popping up. Please forgive me if they’re terrible. It’s YouTube’s fault. My Polish isn’t yet good enough to judge the quality.
https://youtu.be/IfCceLIrg9g
https://youtu.be/xfDc56qlwbs
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Aug 09, 2019 8:23 am

Wow! It’s been a long time again since I last wrote in my log. Well, I haven’t gotten anything done this summer, so I guess there hasn’t really been anything to write about. After I got done being sick and going to all the start-of-summer parties and meetings, I had a brief period of anxiety in which I didn’t get much done. Then I had just started getting back into my routine when I decided I needed to get new glasses. I’d been thinking about it for a while and almost did it this spring, but I decided to wait until after the Gathering because I knew I was starting to have trouble with reading in addition to my pre-existing near-sightedness, and I didn’t want to have to adjust to a new prescription on top of traveling. Well, it was good that I waited because it was horrible. They gave me progressive glasses and that means there is one tiny part of the glass where you can actually see out of and it’s never where you’re trying to look. I could never see anything and it felt like my eyes were being gouged out with spoons. After two weeks, during which I ended up not looking at much of anything, even to the point of walking around with my eyes closed at times, I finally gave up. The optician agreed that I probably wasn’t a suitable candidate. Luckily, they let me have new glasses and offered to pay me back the difference in price without me even asking. Of course, now I have to carry around reading glasses and switch back and forth, but I don’t need them so much yet, so mostly I don’t use them much unless I have to read small print.

During those two weeks, I got rather depressed and anxious again because I thought I’d never see again. (I’m a bit of a hypochondriac.) And my favorite hobbies all involve seeing, so it seemed pretty tough. Anyway, I started making some plans for how to study languages without needing my eyes and decided to look to see if I could find any audio courses like Pimsleur or Michel Thomas that I could borrow from the library. They don’t seem to be very popular with Norwegian libraries, but I did find Pimsleur for Polish, so I ordered that. I tried Pimsleur once a long time ago and wasn’t impressed, but Zenmonkey convinced me that it’s better for some languages than others, so I’m going to see how it is for Polish. I checked the Pimsleur site and it looks like they only have level 1 for Polish and the version that I can borrow seems to have half the number of CD’s as is listed on the Pimsleur site, so I think it’s one of the shortened versions.

Since I fixed the glasses problem, things have been much better, but around the same time, I got two tiny foster-kittens. I do fostering for the animal protection society and I’d had an adult cat since Easter, but they suddenly found a home for him. I thought I would have some time without cats after that, but they gave me two three-week-old orphaned kittens to raise that very same night. So, I haven’t gotten much sleep since then. Now that they are bigger, it’s much easier, but they still haven’t gone completely over to solid food and the little boy is proving to be rather difficult to wean. I’m sure he’d happily drink from a bottle for the rest of his life, but I put my foot down and said he could still have milk for a while, but he’d have to drink from a bowl.

Now, I’m trying to get back to my routine again. I started out making plans and goals, but I realized that that tends to make me either too stressed or too excited and then I don’t sleep and end up unable to study. So, I decided to try not having any time-related goals. I have certain courses or materials I want to work on, but I’m not going to set any end-dates. Instead, I try to work a little on each language every day, or at least every other day. I keep a notebook for each language and every day, I write the date and what I did and I sometimes also include notes on grammar or interesting expressions. I have the notebooks in a pile and after I’ve done some work on one language and written it down in the notebook, I move the notebook to a new pile. The goal is simply to move all the notebooks to the new pile during the day. If there are some left in the old pile, then I start with those ones the next day. Anyway, that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory and it worked pretty well before, but this summer and the addition of Polish has knocked me off course.

I still haven’t really started on Polish. I was doing pretty well with Peppa Pig. I noticed after only four hours that I could hear the sounds pretty clearly (they just sounded like mush in the beginning) and recognize a few words and phrases, but then I stopped watching so often and eventually stopped altogether, so now I’m probably almost back to the beginning. I’m a bit tired of pure Peppa though, so I’m going to do some real study now and continue watching a bit of Peppa every week. I think that will be a good combination.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:00 am

Well, that didn’t go as planned. I mentioned last time that my two orphaned foster kittens were now big enough to eat by themselves, allowing me to sleep through the night, and that I would be able to get back into my study routine. Ha! The animal protection society gave me two more kittens, so now I have four kittens in the house. The orphans are easy at this point. But the two new ones are feral kittens around three months old and I have to tame them. That means I have to spend a good bit of time stroking them (frequently against their will), talking to them, and playing with them. So, I don’t have nearly as much time as I thought I would. I’m also trying to get a bunch of stuff done around the house that I have neglected to do because it was too cold, too hot, or I was too tired and busy with kittens. I have done a little bit of language stuff, but I didn’t get back to my daily study routine yet, nor have I gotten back to my daily exercise routine and I’m definitely feeling that as well.

Spanish
I’m really enjoying Vitamina C1 so far. I’m definitely not going to be going through a chapter a week like I’d imagined though. I’ll be lucky if I get through a chapter a month at this rate. The chapters are very involved, so I don’t think I could get through one a week anyway unless I was working intensively and exclusively on Spanish, or cut corners on the exercises. After I’ve gone through a chapter or two, I’m planning to do a proper review of the book, but it seems really good so far. There are ten chapters and each chapter is divided into four sections each focusing on a grammar point. The exercises in the textbook are often designed for classroom use, but so far, they seem easy to adapt to individual use too. If it says to discuss something, I usually just write it up as an essay giving an account of different possible viewpoints. Within each section of the chapter is a small textbox explaining the relevant grammar point, but there is also an appendix where each grammar point is explained in much more detail. There are also several exercises directly related to the grammar point given in the appendix. The workbook has the same chapter and section divisions as the textbook, but the exercises are more geared towards homework to be done individually rather than in the classroom. It also has exercises scattered throughout the book that are designed to be similar to the tasks in the DELE. Depending on the nature of the exercise, solutions can often be found in the back of the textbook or workbook. The solutions are often very short and simple though. I generally try to give longer, more involved answers when doing the exercises, so usually I can only get through one or two small exercises in a day, if that. All the audios are available online and there are appendices with the transcripts in the books.

In addition to textbook work, I’ve finished the telenovela I was watching (Qué pobres tan ricos), which I think is my new favorite now. I guess now I should go back to watching Cuéntame, though maybe less intensively than before. There’s not much point in writing down all the vocabulary if I don’t do anything with it anyway.

I also had another conversation with the girl I met at the Gathering. I was really rusty after a whole summer with nearly no active use of the language, so it was very frustrating. I need to get back to making at least occasional recordings again.

German
I’ve barely touched German since last time, but I did do a few exercises in Themen aktuell. I think it was a good idea to start with the level A2 book. A lot of it seems pretty easy, but there are also exercises in the latter half of the book that make me think and that feel rather difficult. It’s exposing some of the holes left by my haphazard, mostly input-based method of learning German. I need some active grammar study as well. One recent exercise was a fill-in-the-blank exercise where the only thing missing was the separable verb prefix. There were about 20 sentences and there was a box at the top listing the six or seven prefixes to be used in the exercise. Even with that help, it felt really hard. I kept questioning what exactly the sentence meant to express. Were they sending the thing out? Away? In? I ended up getting almost all of them right, but it did show me that I don’t feel very confident in that area.

Japanese
I haven’t really touched Anki in ages. I guess I’ve reached my saturation point for now. Maybe I’ll go back to it later. For now, I decided to sign up for a year of Satori Reader. It seems like a fairly relaxed way to study and maybe I can absorb enough to feel comfortable watching TV and reading. I don’t really have plans to become good at speaking Japanese, but I would like to be able to read and listen without too much struggle.

Polish
I’ve still barely gotten anywhere with Polish. I’m not as enthusiastic about it as I’d thought I would be. I think my problem is that I want to learn every language except the one that I “have to” learn. I loved Norwegian until I moved here and had to learn it, the Language Jam seemed like a great idea until I was actually assigned a language and just felt “meh”, and every time I’ve made an agreement to learn a language with a group, I’ve given up fairly quickly, even if I’d been actively studying the language earlier. Still, I’m going to try to get into Polish. I think the thing that frustrates me the most at the moment is the pronunciation. I don’t really know what the difference is between all those different letters that sound the same, (which is basically all of them). So far, I’ve done a tiny bit of Memrise and I’ve found out I should be extra careful not to step on anyone’s foot in Poland, because in Polish, “sorry” definitely is one of the hardest things to say. Somebody should really buy them a vowel or two.

I’ve also done a little with Glossika. They have a new system where you have to type the sentence out each time and I hated it at first, but it’s grown on me. I use voice-entry for the most part rather than actually typing, but some of those Polish sentences are impossible. I’m not sure how much of the problem is my bad pronunciation and how much is the fault of the voice-entry system, but sometimes I’ll try twenty times and every time, it just writes nonsense. The Pimsleur I ordered through the library finally came too. I ripped the disks to my computer, but I haven’t transferred them to my phone yet. I’ll try to do that soon and then I can try taking some walks with Pimsleur and get some exercise and some studying in at the same time. Unfortunately, there are only eight lessons in this version, so it won’t take me very far.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Aug 19, 2019 10:15 am

Brun Ugle wrote:Polish


NO, no, NO!

<kicks and screams>

You guys dragged me on various language safaris and left me there. Way of the lazy fist... way of the crowded bus... way of kicking and screaming ...

No.

(I may have an old Assimil tape set I can convert to MP3s along the way....)
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby StringerBell » Mon Aug 19, 2019 1:12 pm

Brun Ugle wrote: But the two new ones are feral kittens around three months old and I have to tame them. That means I have to spend a good bit of time stroking them (frequently against their will), talking to them, and playing with them.


I'm pretty sure all cats are pet against their will. :D My cats always acted like they were doing me a really big favor by allowing me to pet them.

Brun Ugle wrote:Polish
I’ve still barely gotten anywhere with Polish.

Me, too! :lol:

Brun Ugle wrote:I think the thing that frustrates me the most at the moment is the pronunciation. I don’t really know what the difference is between all those different letters that sound the same, (which is basically all of them).


I think you are talking about the sound difference between pairs like ś and sz, or ć and cz, right? The secret is there is no difference! Even if someone claims there's a difference, if after 1,500+ listening I can't detect a difference, any possible difference is negligible, so I think of them as being interchangeable in terms of the sound they make, which hasn't affected my pronunciation or understanding, so I wouldn't worry about this at all.
ś and sz = the English sound "sh"
ć and cz = the English "ch"
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby tungemål » Mon Aug 19, 2019 1:29 pm

Hey, we got exactly the same languages!

I did Polish for a year and I think it is a beautiful language. I will get back to it some day. Polish pronunciation is not that hard actually. It is written totally phonetic, and some letter combinations really are pronounced the same even though they look different. They distinguish between ś and sz, ć and cz and so on, and this distinction could be hard. But if you got the "kj" sound in Norwegian down, you can leverage that to pronounce ś, because they share the same tongue position. When I discovered that it became easy, for me as a Norwegian. As an aside Mandarin got this same distinction: xi-sh, qi-ch are analogous to ś-sz, ć-cz.

Brun Ugle wrote:Polish
...
I think the thing that frustrates me the most at the moment is the pronunciation. I don’t really know what the difference is between all those different letters that sound the same, (which is basically all of them). So far, I’ve done a tiny bit of Memrise and I’ve found out I should be extra careful not to step on anyone’s foot in Poland, because in Polish, “sorry” definitely is one of the hardest things to say. Somebody should really buy them a vowel or two.
3 x


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