How You Say?

O cholera! O choroba!

English Phonemes: “oh hoh-LEH-rah! oh ho-ROH-bah!”

At the top of the show, Julia answers a listener question from last week's lesson. This week's lesson is a duo of common phrases you'll hear used as polite curses, like we say "oh sugar!" or "oh, bother!" in English. Poles very commonly express frustration with polite expletives like this when they're restraining themselves from full-fledged fowl language. If one of your Polish-speaking friends stubs their toe and utters a loud "O cholera!", now you'll know why!

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A special bonus note not mentioned in the audio lesson: You'll notice that "Cholera" is capitalized as a pronoun in English, but written lowercase in Polish. In Polish, only people's names and places are capitalized. Impersonal or inanimate proper pronouns like diseases, days of the week, names of the month, etc., are written in lowercase. Fun fact!

Cześć! 

English Phonemes: “[CZ]ehshch”

Tricky word this week because there is a non-English phoneme on top of there being only one syllable in a word with both the ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ sounds. 

[Note that the brackets [] mean that this phoneme doesn't have an English equivalent.]

This word means hi and bye in the same way 'Aloha' in Hawaii means the same. In this lesson, Julia digs deep into the pronunciation of this word so you get a feel for the difference between the 'cz' phoneme and the Polish letter 'ć' which is pronounced 'ch' like in 'chair' or 'chess'. The letter 'ś', by the way, is pronounced 'sh' like in 'shutters' or 'shimmer'. 

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Miłej zabawy!

English Phonemes: “MEE-way zah-BAH-vih”

This friendly phrase literally translates to "pleasant game" but is used exactly the same way we use "have fun" in English when we send friends or family members off to have a fun time at whatever outing their heading out to enjoy.

As you're embarking on this Polish speaking journey, we hope you have fun, too!

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"Idź Krowie Na Ogon!"

English Phonetics: "Eej kroh-vyeh Nah Oh-gohn"

Literally in English, "Go onto a cow's tail!" One of my favorite phrases. The meaning is the same as when we say in English 'get out of here with that' or 'go fly a kite'. It's a typical phrase you'll hear in Polish if someone is having their leg pulled and calls the other out on it, or when someone wants to playfully shoo someone else away.

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