You know a lot about Dutch and Belgian people, but what do you...

But what do you really know about Poland and Polish?

I was amused when someone told me that British think that in Poland is very, very cold.
In Poland summer is so hot that British people can only dream of such summer :)

I think a Polish winter is colder than a British winter.

Because it is a 'language forum' not a 'weather one', I would like to ask you, how do you think, are Polish good English speakers?

I think they are not bad, but I am not a native speaker of English :)

Adam, you're right. It seems that British have autumn all the time ;)
In Poland you have four seasons and you can distinguish them easily :)

Well , the polish aren't exactly interesting , now is it ?
It's cold , it's poor , ...

About fifteen years ago I met a Polish girl from Warsaw. She was the daughter of a friend of mine, a Russian who'd married a Polish woman. This girl was 16 at the time and spoke English quite well, even though she'd been studying it for only two years. She had a mixed British/American accent, with a slight, underlying Polish accent.

What I find most interesting about Poland is (except the crazy spelling of Polish words) is the fact that so much of today's Poland: East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia etc. was settled by Poles (from provinces in the east that Poland had to cede to the Soviet union) as recently as after 1945, when the Germans living there were driven away. Is there some kind of settler spirit in those areas? Like in the American Midwest when it was being settled?

I love the way Poles plaintively squeeze out their vowels in English, often sounding like they are putting a "Y" in front of them. Even "yes" becomes "yyes". And they have a funny way going "hnh" in a high, clucking kind of way as an interjection. "Hnh, Iy syeey wayt yyou myean!" But most of the Poles I know are in Rome, speaking beautifully inflected Italian. I love the pope's Italian (well, when his holiness could still speak).

What I know about the poles ?

I know the love to work in the Netherlands with their 'old' and unwashed BMW and mercedces (?).That they can speak a few words english (poor vocabulary though) but they tend to stick to speaking german.(I know they speak polish and not german in poland! =)

VERY nice people though!

=>I love the pope's Italian (well, when his holiness could still speak).<=

What THAT italian ?! I always thought it was latin!Well the way that poor old man talks it could have been chinese as wel.

Poland is a country that deserves every respect for having opposed the nazi army with horses, courage and honour only.

Most Poles are polyglots, easy-going and Europe-minded.

OK they did in huge mistake in supporting the Bush war for oil in Iraq. That was a Beotian's error though.

Forgive Poland, ignore Italy, punish Britain.

Fredrik from Norway wrote : "the crazy spelling of Polish words".

The Polish spelling is totally consistent and regular. Their orthography isn't crazy. Our ignorance is.

I'd have to agree with greg here, as while some of the conventions used by Polish spelling may seem a bit weird, compared to, say, those used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and roman-script Serbo-Croatian, within Polish spelling itself they word out quite well, as a whole, despite the minor complexities involved in palatalization as marked in Polish orthography. It's nothing like, say, English, French, or Danish spelling, all of which are absolutely horrible as orthographic systems.

I have to agree with Travis' post. The spellings of all languages in East Central Europe (the area between Germany and the ex-Soviet countries) are very consistent and phonetic, including those of Polish and Hungarian, which often use digraphs for particular sounds (like Polish "sz" for /sh/, thus Warszawa is pronounced as "vahrshavah", the "w" being the same sound as in "village" and not "we" in English).

Sorry, I meant greg's post, but I agree with both him and Travis.