English translation

Hello, hello, hello. My name is Radek, and I am pleased to welcome you in the next episode on the 'Polish with Radek’ channel. Today I will tell you a bit about the pronunciation. About how you can improve your Polish pronunciation. Or rather: bring her closer to native speakers’ pronunciation.

This video is meant for people who learn Polish. Therefore, it is entirely in Polish, so as to provide exposure to this language. However, if you don’t speak Polish yet, or you don’t understand everything I am talking about, you can switch on the subtitles that are available for this video in Polish and English. And from English you can automatically translate them into any other language of your choice.

I, personally, think that an accent in the Polish [i.e., a foreign] language is a normal thing. It sometimes said that it is a proof of courage. But for many people it is a matter of ambition… or… they set themselves a goal to speak very close to how Poles speak. If this is also your case, these are several (such) things, to which you can pay a closer attention, while improving your pronunciation.

First thing, and a very important in Polish, the lexical stress. Lexical stress in Polish almost always falls on the last syllable of a word. This is not always the case in other languages, such as English, Russian or Spanish. Therefore, people from these countries, who are learning Polish, tend to struggle with mastering Polish pronunciation. And it also works the other way: Poles tend to struggle to master lexical stress for instance in Spanish, as stressing the last syllable might change the meaning of a word.

Lyrics of the song „To nic nie znaczy” [„It doesn’t matter”] address lexical stress in Polish. The author or the main hero of this song notices a toy which stresses some words not the way it should, and it irritates him a lot.

And it is true that even if Poles cannot spot lexical stress in foreign languages, that is, they are not always able to place it on the right syllable, when someone places the accent where it shouldn’t be placed in their language, they intuitively sense that something does not exactly sound as it should, that something is wrong.

Second pillar of the Polish pronunciation is the pronunciation of vowels. There are relatively few vowels in Polish compared for instance to English, which has more vowels. But what is important, Polish vowels are always read the same way as they are written. That is, if it is an 'o’, we read it as an 'o’, if it is an 'e’, ​​we read it like an 'e’. It may be different, for example, in Russian. When a letter is read as an 'a’, while it’s written as 'o’ [or vice versa]. For example, 'moja’ in Russian would be 'моя’. In Polish if there’s an 'o’, we read that 'o’ as an 'o’, and no other letter.

The second thing related to vowels is something that Poles call 'zaciąganie’ [stretching, prolonging]. That is, vowels in Polish are quite short (it works differently in East Slavic languages, such as Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian), therefore, you can often tell that a person comes from the East by the length of the vowels they produce.

Finally, the third thing is hypercorrection, when it comes to nasal vowels, such as 'ą’ or 'ę’. For example, in the word 'dziękuję’, the last 'ę’ is pronounced by Poles as an 'e’… anyway, the nasality of this vowel is very slightly articulated. If someone is learning Polish, and gets familiar with the vowel pronunciation, they will try to pronounce this word exactly the way it is written: 'dziękujĘ’. But Poles don’t speak like this, it is called hypercorrection, some nasals are very subtle.

Ok, we are done with the vowels, now let’s get to the consonants. In the context of consonants, let’s draw our attention to two specific consonants, the first of them being 'cz’. I talked about the consonant 'cz’ in my other video, discussing the pronunciation of Szczęsny’s surname. In this video I would like to notice that Polish 'cz’ is a fairly hard consonant. Compared to, for example, Spanish or Italian, where its equivalents are softer. That is, Polish 'cz’ sounds a bit different from the Spanish 'ch’, as in the word 'mucho’ or Italian 'ci’, as in the word 'ciao’. In these languages ​​’ch’ and 'ci’ are softened, and in Polish the 'cz’ is rather raw, harder.

And the second consonant is 'w’… 'w’ in Polish is a labiodental sound. So it differs from other languages ​​in which 'w’ can be pronounced as a labial sound. And thus, some nationalities, such as Ukrainians or Spaniards, for example, may have some problems with pronouncing the sound 'w’ in this particular way, specific to the Polish language.

And the last thing I would like to pay attention to regarding the consonants is the so-called devoicing. That is, some sounds, when they appear at the end of a word, or next to another word that begins with a […] voiceless sound, also become voiceless. For example, in the word 'obiad’ the last 'd’ is pronounced as a 't’, so a 'd’ becomes a 't’: we don’t say 'obiaD’, but 'obiat’.

As for the rules I mentioned, that is: first, the lexical stress; second, three things to pay attention to when it comes to vowels; and also three things regarding consonants, I recommend improving the pronunciation through listening, even to videos like this one, when you can observe these rules in the way I speak. In other words, these rules can be learnt rather intuitively. If you hear a certain pronunciation, then (when speaking) you will be speaking in a similar way. But it’s important to be aware of these contrasts that exist between your first language and Polish. Because many times when speaking a foreign language we use the sounds, the patterns that we know from our first language.

If you liked this video, I encourage you to subscribe to this channel, give a like … and also to watch my previous video which I have already mentioned, which also discusses Polish pronunciation, from a bit different perspective: I am discussing the pronunciation of a specific word, a specific name of a Polish athlete.