Going back to my roots to learn Polish
Alex Koszykowska is the newest member of the EuroTalk team, joining us last month as our new sales and marketing assistant. In today’s post she explains why she’s learning Polish.
My grandma, dad, sister and me. I’m the little one!
It is said that a million people in the UK class Poland as their ancestral home in some way. This is the case for my family; my Granddad came to England from Poland during the second world war (my Gran also came over to England but from Russia – she and my Granddad met when she was a nurse in the army). Over the years my Gran has adapted to my Granddad’s ways, and will now only speak Polish or very basic English to us. Growing up, my dad and his brothers were all brought up speaking Polish as their main language, with English as their second. Even today they can slip into Polish very naturally – leaving my sister and I completely oblivious to what was going on around us. My mum and aunties all learnt to speak Polish – mainly to get brownie points from my Gran; but really it is only my sister, my cousins and I who cannot speak Polish in our family.
This means regularly at our family’s favourite restaurant (which of course is owned by a Polish family), we would be pretending to understand what everyone was talking about.Whenever we entered the hotel, I would always greet the family with ‘Cześć’ (hi). My sister and I have also mastered how to say ‘Dziekuje ci bardzo’, which means ‘thank you very much’ (and rolls off the tongue much more easily then you think it would). We have managed to get away with this throughout our childhood. However, now I feel a certain responsibility to carry on this tradition in our family. Working for EuroTalk has shown me that language learning isn’t as intimidating as many people make out.
Part of the reason it is so enjoyable to be learning Polish is that I love everything about my Polish roots. From the tradition of whenever we go to my Gran’s she hands us a pack of Katarzynki (which are like soft biscuits with a ginger flavour in the middle and chocolate around the outside) to our rather impossible to say, spell and write surname (with a lot of people finding the change from ‘a’ if you’re female to ‘i’ if you’re male for the last letter of our surname confusing!).
The four words I do know (five if you include dobrze – ok) make my Gran so happy; she loves seeing us take an interest in our Granddad’s language. Even basic language skills are so important and can make a huge difference. My family heritage is my motivation to learn more Polish, which is why the uTalk app is so fabulous, as it is designed so you can learn how to say key phrases. For example ‘proszę mówić wolniej’, meaning ‘please speak more slowly’, which is vital to know in my family!
Are you interested in learning a language, or do you have family members who are bilingual and you’re keen to join them? Try our uTalk app to get started!
Alex
5 times you spoke Italian and didn’t know it
Did you know that you speak Italian?
No, really – you do. And we don’t just mean that time you ordered a pizza. Here are a few words you’ve probably used at some point, but might not have realised were Italian:
Novella
Longer than a short story, but not quite a full novel. Well-known novellas include John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone (The Decameron). The word ‘novella’ comes from the Italian meaning ‘new’.
Paparazzi
The use of this term to describe photo-journalists who follow and take pictures of celebrities can be traced back to a character in Federico Fellini’s 1960 classic movie, La Dolce Vita. Reports vary as to why Fellini chose this name for the independent photographer in the film, but one version of events claims it’s a word from an Italian dialect describing the annoying noise made by a small insect.
A cappella
Anyone who’s seen Pitch Perfect will know that a cappella means singing without any musical accompaniment, but its literal meaning in Italian is ‘in the manner of the chapel’. And it’s not the only Italian word used in music; the list is seemingly endless but a few examples are piano (quiet), allegro (lively and fast), crescendo (getting louder) and lacrimoso (sad).
Tarantula
The first spiders to be called ‘tarantulas’ were named for the Italian city of Taranto, where they were first found. Interestingly, these weren’t the hairy beasties we call tarantulas today, but what are now known as wolf spiders. (Not that we’d want to find either of them in our house.) Many people in southern Italy during the 16th and 17th century believed that a bite from the spider would cause a hysterical condition called tarantism, which could only be cured by dancing the tarantella.
Graffiti
Graffiti comes from the Italian word ‘graffito’, which means ‘scratched’, and in art history the term is used to describe work created by scratching designs onto a surface. The word dates back to the 19th century, when it was used to describe inscriptions and drawings found in the ancient ruins of Pompeii, and today has taken on a mostly negative connotation – no matter how skilful the artist, graffiti is generally considered synonymous with vandalism.
There are plenty more examples of Italian words that have found their way into other languages – among them:
Stiletto: from the Italian word ‘stilo’, meaning ‘dagger’.
Mafia: its origins are uncertain, but many believe it to be from the Sicilian word ‘mafiusu’, which means ‘swagger’ or ‘bravado’.
Extravaganza: a spectacular theatrical production, which takes its name from the Italian word ‘stravaganza’ (extravagance).
Quarantine: derived from ‘quaranta’, the 40 days of isolation required to try and halt the spread of the Black Death in the 14th century.
How many Italian words have you used recently…?
Language of the week: Italian
Buongiorno!
Italian is our language of the week, in celebration of an annual tradition, Il Palio, which dates back to the 12th century and is held on the 16th of August.
This is a horse race unlike any other, and is all over in 90 seconds. It’s held in the beautiful city of Siena, where the 17 districts compete against each other for the glory. Amazingly a district can still win if the horse loses their jockey during the race, as long as they’re over the finish line first (this has actually happened 23 times since records began). If you have a chance to visit Siena while the Palio is on, you should go – the main square is filled with flags from each district and there is an incredible atmosphere throughout the whole town.
If you want to see just how much the Palio is celebrated in Siena have a look at this…
Here are some of the best things we’ve discovered this week about Italian:
- One of the longest words in Italian is ‘precipitevolissimevolmente’ which means ‘extremely quickly’.
- This Italian tongue twister: ‘Trentatré Trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatré trotterellando’… which means ‘thirty three Trentonians came into Trento, all thirty three trotting.’
- The word ‘Gelato’ means Italian style ice cream (different to normal ice cream for a number of reasons; firstly it is made with a higher proportion of milk to cream, secondly it has a slower churning process and finally it is served at a slightly warmer temperature than ice cream). Gelato is potentially one of the most important words to know in Italian, as the ice cream cone is an Italian invention and Italy is famous for its Gelato. There’s even an ice cream university in Bologna (Carpigiani Gelato University).
- Italian is a Romance language, meaning it has a Latin origin. Gesture could also be considered important to the Italian language, as messages are often conveyed using hands and facial expressions. When in Italy, you’ll probably hear people saying ‘Ciao Bella!’ to each other as a friendly greeting – but if you don’t want to be too familiar, you may wish to stick to ‘Buongiorno’ (good day) the first time you meet someone.
- The Italian alphabet has twenty-one letters in it. It does not include the letters J, K, W, X and Y; these letters can only be found in foreign words that are common in everyday Italian writing.
- To wish someone good luck in Italian, you should say, ‘In bocca al lupo!’, which translates literally as ‘In the mouth of the wolf’. The correct response to this expression is, ‘Crepi il lupo!’, which means ‘May the wolf die!’
Do you have a favourite Italian word or phrase? We would love to hear from you, so feel free to comment below, tweet us @EuroTalk or write to us on Facebook! And if you’d like to learn some Italian, why not try our free demo, or download our uTalk app to get started.
Alex
Emoji: The New Universal Language?
👋👇👌 – Hi, are you okay?
👍☺️ – I’m good thanks!
👏 – yay!
Or something like that.
Welcome to the wonderful language that is emojis 😁
And before you express concern that we are confused about what is a language and what is not, hey. Your entire screen staring back up at you currently is composed of a series of ones and zeros, manipulated into the glorious thing you see before you and that, the ones and zeros, is a language all in itself. Binary code. If you’re interested.
Emojis are much, much prettier to look at than a bunch of ones and zeros though, aren’t they?
😖?
Yes, we know. Emojis can be confounding to us too. But a language is a language, and language learning is good for our cognitive reasoning 😇
So let us give you a little introduction into the wonderful world of emojis, see if we can entice you in or relieve you of your confusion. Here are some reasons why we vote emojis as our new favourite international language.
✒️📚🕐 study time!
- So firstly, you may have heard of emoticons. Emoticons are not emojis, repeat, they are not emojis ‼️ Emoticons are ‘pictures’ composed of the keyboard symbols we already have, such as :), :(, and :D. Even our mothers know how to use them.
- Emojis originate from Japan and are, like Japanese characters themselves, pictographs. The word itself means ‘picture’ – e and ‘character’ – moji. Another argument in favour of emojis being a language, don’t you think?
- Emojis actually have specific, individual meanings but in the way that colloquial language changes and adapts, they can mean different things to different people. For example, 😋 ’officially’ means face savouring delicious food, but whenever we use this in our Whatsapp messages, it generally means we are being exceptionally cheeky. Tongue sort-of in cheek, see?
- Emojis are a beautiful, universal thing, allowing people to communicate when normal language barriers would apply. And there’s no grammar! Truly, this is a joyous thing.
- Emojis are also doing their bit for diversity. The latest versions of iOS offer emoji with different skin tones:
- and the generic ‘one size fits all’ ones…
- …and those for people of the LBGT community, 👭👬🌈❤️. But none for redheads apparently. There’s a campaign on Change for that at the moment.
- Emojis are multi-platform. You can use them, in various versions on all devices, and everyone is in on the act. Even National Rail Enquiries, who, on World Emoji Day last Friday, invited Twitter followers to guess station names using a series of emojis.
It’s #WorldEmojiDay ! (Yes, it exists…) See if you can solve our quiz For help: http://t.co/wkstHtiOKE pic.twitter.com/gQGnKy4X5C
— National Rail (@nationalrailenq) July 17, 2015
- Emojis can shorten your messages and bring a smile to a recipient’s face: even if it’s just because they’re trying to understand what you mean:
🎄👜🙏?
Please come Christmas shopping with me?
✈️🎫😘
Enjoy your holiday in Cyprus!
😈🍹💻🕔?
Join me for a cheeky drink after work?
- Some businesses will even let you order dinner via Twitter: 🍕
We could go on. But we’d probably get silly.
So the next time someone shows disdain for your messages full of emojis, you are well within your rights to reply with a 😝 that says hey, I’m learning a new language here!
Are you for or against emoji? Tell us what you think!
Kelly
A beginner’s guide to Esperanto
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Esperanto week! If we’ve convinced you to give the language a try, you might find this handy beginner’s guide a good place to start… Please feel free to share it with anyone you think might be interested.
And for more information about Esperanto, visit edukado.net, a site run by linguist Katalin Kováts, who worked with us on the translation and recording of uTalk Esperanto.
Following a request, this guide is now also available in Spanish.
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