English translation

Hi. Recently [all] Poland is (super) excited about transfer speculations regarding Wojciech Szczęsny. Everything indicates that the Polish goalkeeper will move to Barcelona.

If you are watching this video, and you don’t speak Polish fluently yet, you might need subtitles which you can activate here on YouTube. And if you need a full transcription with additional exercises, so that you can get familiar with it at your own pace, it is available for free download on my website. You will find a link to this transcript in the description of this video.

A few months ago, Wojciech Szczęsny did not extend his contract with Juventus, and declared his career ended. It seemed that Wojtek would focus on family life, and he will not return to football. Meanwhile, Barcelona’s current goalkeeper, Ter Stegen, got a serious injury which excluded him from the game for the rest of this season. Therefore, Ter Stegen’s club, i.e. FC Barcelona, ​​needs to find a new goalkeeper, who will be the number one for the next year. Everything indicates that it will be Wojciech Szczęsny, who has already established cooperation with the representatives of the Catalan club.

Okay, a few days have passed, and this information is now official, so Wojciech Szczęsny is officially a Barcelona player. However, this does not change much in the context of what I want to tell you in this video, i.e. how to say his name correctly, how to learn it. So keep watching…

I thought this would be a good time to tell you a bit about the pronunciation of this surname. Szczęsny. For many people from abroad, this is a very difficult name to pronounce. I remember once watching a video with Massimo Allegri, Juventus coach, who described (such) a situation, when before a match representatives of the football federation asked him to provide the squad that would play in that match. And [Allegri] had a very big problem with writing the name Wojciech Szczęsny. Four consonants at the very beginning. First S, then Z, then C, and then Z again. Then E with this strange „tail”… The beginning was a particular problem for Allegri. When will a vowel finally appear, and how many consonants in a row can Poles pronounce. S-z-c-z… This is of course a very funny story, and I think it’s a good introduction to tell you, how to pronounce Szczęsny’s surname correctly.

It is crucial to understand that where foreigners see four consonants, Poles actually only see two sounds. One of them is SZ and the other one is CZ. SZ is the Polish equivalent of the English SH, as for example in the word „shower”. And CZ is a bit like Polish (*English) CH. A bit like in the English word „check” or „chip”. What is unique in Polish, and probably does not exist in English, is that these two clusters follow each other. That is, first we have SZ, and then CZ. SZ for „shower” and CZ for „check”. And that creates a combination which sounds very exotic. Sh-ch. Sh-ch. Once, when I taught this to my Italian friends, they associated it with reloading a machine gun. Sh-ch. Sh-ch. You can remember it this way.

Then comes a vowel, which is also not an ordinary vowel, but a nasal vowel. That is, it is not pronounced so much by mouth, like typical vowels such as E or A, but part of the air goes through the nose. Ę, Ę. A similar vowel in Polish is Ą. Ą. Nasal vowels also occur in other European languages. For example, if you are from Portugal or France, then this is probably nothing new to you, but for many people, for example, English-speaking such nasal vowels are something new, and also a challenge, when you want to pronounce the surname Szczęsny.

Next after Ę is the consonant S. What’s important is that it’s a consonant which is pronounced like this: Sssss, a bit like… like the hiss of a snake: Sssss. A common mistake is for foreigners to pronounce this consonant, as Z (SzczęZny). I’ve heard this version a few times, where S almost turned into the consonant Z, which in Polish is another consonant.

Next is N. N is quite simple and occurs in most European languages. And at the end there is „igrek”, i.e. Y. It is said that it is „igrek” when this letter is in the alphabet and we want to name it, but the sound is Y. It is important that this sound does not exist, for example, in English. It’s not the same Y you sometimes find in the names of American celebrities or athletes, who have Slavic… Slavic-sounding surnames such as Emily Ratajkowski or Wayne Gretzky. We pronounce Y as Y, not I. Y (vs.) I. Notice that this is a slightly different sound.

Okay, so you already know all the sounds, which are part of the Szczęsny surname. That is, SZ, CZ, Ę, S, N, Y. Szczęsny, Szczęsny. If you want to practice pronunciation, I recommend the method which Paul Pimsleur describes in his book, namely, that it is best to practice pronouncing this surname backwards. So first say to yourself -y, then -ny, -ny, -ny. Practice this -ny, then -sny, -sny. It is important that it is S, so that you can hear and emphasize strongly this S, that hissing sound at the beginning. Then try to add another sound to it, i.e. -ęsny, -ęsny. Remember that this is a nasal sound, Ę, -ęsny, ęsny. Then add the first of these two sounds, which consist of two letters. So CZ, -częsny, -częsny. And finally, you just need to reload the gun, i.e. say Szczęsny, SZ-CZ, Szczęsny.

I hope this helps you in your learning: whether of the name of Wojciech Szczęsny, or Polish pronunciation, Polish phonetics more generally. I hope you benefited from this video and see you in the next one. I’m aiming to post videos like this on this channel: in which I talk about topics related to Poland, the Polish language, Poles, life in Poland. So that by using them, by getting to know more about various things, you would learn Polish. I also intend to speak slowly here on this channel, use quite understandable, simple vocabulary, but at the same time authentically, just like I normally talk to people every day. These are not learned dialogues, which you won’t actually hear outside the textbook, but natural language, used by Poles.

If you want to know more, I invite you to visit my website. Additional materials can be downloaded there: guide about how to learn foreign languages; apart from that, you can also check out what method is best for you, by taking the test you will also find in the free resources section on my website. Click the link in the description. See if you can find something for yourself there. It was a Polish with Radek video. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad you’re learning Polish. And I hope that thanks to this channel, thanks to this content, learning Polish will become easier and more enjoyable for you.