Consonants in formation
Seven cases, nasal vowels and clusters that look impossible until you learn that most of them are single sounds.
Seven cases, nasal vowels, and consonant clusters that look typeset by accident: the hardest big language in Europe, which is exactly the badge. Forty million speakers await. The EU's fastest-growing big economy, pierogi diplomacy, and a diaspora everywhere: Polish speakers never lack for a warm welcome or a job lead.
za-WAT-feech
To sort something out by knowing who to ask.
To get something done the Polish way: through contacts, favours, charm and side doors, never quite through the official queue. A verb that survived communism because it was how one survived communism.
tensk-NO-ta
Longing that has settled in and become part of how you live.
Polish longing for people and places out of reach, heavier than missing and softer than grief. The emigrant's constant companion, and a national speciality of a country whose borders kept moving.
Where Polish parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Polish with.
The Polish Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.