Everyone who is taking up a foreign language is very happy to hear the words that sound similar in both his native language and the language they are learning. It‘s all fine as long as the words not only sound similar but also mean similar or the same things. Otherwise we’re dealing with everyone’s nightmare called false friends.
THE PROBLEM CONCERNING NOT ONLY SLAVIC LANGUAGE SPEAKERS
I would seem that in case of the Polish language the problem arises when the Slavs take it up. Obviously, there’s plenty of false friends within the same language group (we’re going to devote a separate entry to these), however, we should not think that the speakers of English, Italian or Finnish have nothing to worry about. At first sight these languages seem very different from Polish and it’s hard to find the words that sound similar. But just listen to an everyday conversation in Polish and you’ll change your mind. Examples?
CONSULT A DICTIONARY BEFORE USING WORDS
Imagine that an English speaker needs to go to the doctor’s. He or she is sitting in the waiting room and overhears a conversation between two other patients:
- Bardzo dziś boli mnie bark – one of them complains.
The English speaker has been living in Poland, so he or she has definitely attended a Polish language course and has understood almost everything. But the „bark“ doesn’t seem to fit here. Was the dog barking so loudly that the person started to feel pain? Strange structure. Not at all! The structure is nothing complex. The word „bark“ is the key to understanding the sentence. In Polish the word means „shoulder“, and in English it is the sound that dogs make.
We should also watch out for what we’re saying when taking to an attractive Italian man or woman; our invitation to kolacja (dinner/supper) may be understood as an invitation to colazione, which means „breakfast“ in Italian. A Finn may look in surprise at the form he or she is trying to fill out, because one of the questions is about the name of the trip. All the confusion is caused by the word „matka“, which in Finnish means „trip“ and in Polish it’s „mother“ and it’s the mother’s name that the Finn needs to put in.
Therefore, before we use a Polish word that sounds similar to a word in our language, we’d better look it up in a dictionary to make sure it’s not a false friend.
