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

I once read somewhere that Polish is about the most difficult language for English speaking people to pronounce....I mean from the way it is written, reading the letters in the same way as they are sounded in English. There are so many Zs and Cs and a string of consonants all joined together in way that doesn't occur in English.

I met a lot of Polish people when I worked at the supermarket...they come over to the UK in large numbers every year to do seasonal work of all kinds. On the whole those I met spoke very good English and they loved to chat...taking every opportunity to improve their already good English language skills. All of them are working toward a much better future for Poland, especially now that it is a member of the EU and benefiting from it. It will happen!

Just an observation...they seem to be a very tall race of people! I know I am much shorter than average but many of the Poles seem to be about 2m tall! And they like vodka...is that why the're so tall? :-)

Damian, on the whole, Poles aren't so tall. I mean, it is surely not characteristic of Polish people. You can meet tall people amongst them but it is not vodka what makes them growing :) There is even a saying: "Don't smoke and don't drink alcohol because you won't grow"

Yes, I also try to catch every opportunity to improve my English and when I meet an English speaker, he or she has no chance - I must chat for a while with them :)

I admit, Polish language can be very hard sometimes, but of course not for native speakers ;)

When I remarked that Polish spelling was "crazy", I very well knew that it makes very much sense for Poles. But for a Western European it looks crazy. As most things, it very much depends on your viewpoint.
But what about my question about any "settler feeling" in the former German territories that were settled by Poles after 1945???

Fredrik from Norway,

What you called 'former German territories' were Polish from the beginning on until the Drang nach Osten took place - in the Middle Age, many Germanophones migrated to places like Poznania, Silesia, Mazuria, Mazowia, Baltics, East Prussia etc. However, the former DDR was Slavic in Carolingian times (Leipzig = Lipska etc).

Sorry for any misspelling.

Greg:
If they were Polish from "the beginning" I can't say, because I don't know when the Slavs settled here. Some say the Germanic peoples came from the Wistula region. But most place names show that the Poles were here before the Germans.
But I suppose I can say that they were "former German territories" when some of them had been part of German Empire since the Middle Ages, others since the partitions of Poland. But of course, many Poles also lived in these German territories (especially in the more recently aquired ones, like Posen/Poznan.

Are polish considered "pure" slavic by other slavic people ?(since you lie so close to germany and you have a very "close" history with germanic people...(Doesnt a part of east-prussia lie in poland?!

>Are polish considered "pure" slavic by other slavic people ?

I'm not Slavic, but I'd like to point out that there's no such thing as "pure" ethnicities/races in Eastern Europe or anywhere else. Just off the top of my head, the Bulgarians are intermixed with Turkish tribes, the Russians are intermixed with Vikings, and everyone in Eastern Europe is probably intermixed with the Mongolians to some degree.

=>I'm not Slavic, but I'd like to point out that there's no such thing as "pure" ethnicities/races in Eastern Europe or anywhere else<=

Yes,well I didn't really mean to discuss races,(that would sound a bit nazi to me,to be honest) I was pointing towards culture.

Linguistically speaking, Polish was somewhat influenced by Romance (Italian and French) and Germanic (German and English) languages. But Polish remains authentically Slavic.

Okay