I think I know where the sound problem is coming from. I couldn’t tell “were” from “wear” if my life depended on it. I can only guess the difference from context, but they both sound exactly the same to me.

It’s just that we can discern only these sounds that we are somehow familiar with. Otherwise they all become an indiscernible mass. I always think that Poles find French so beautiful because all their sounds are familiar to us. We can discern them even without knowing the language. But then no Slavic people think any other Slavic language nice, because they just sound to us like our own language only spoken badly, lol.

I remember a Shakin Steven’s song where he was singing “Cry just a little bit”. Seems easy to me now, but when I was first listening to the song I heard something like “qua justah lubah”. Since I started to learn English I started to anticipate the words that should be there, but the sounds… Well, they still may sound very muffled to me.

When Laura was here and tried to learn the basic words like “thank you”, “good morning” etc. her problem wasn’t that she didn’t try enough, only that she couldn’t really hear the sounds. Many of those that are distinct to us, seemed all the same to her. And it’s not because she’s deaf, she was singing beautifully in the car, lol.

I.e. our thank you is dziekuje. There are six sounds there. The first one “dzi” doesn’t exist in any western language – it’s in a way similar to the sound of a bell (Polish generally has many onomatopoeias – words that’s sounds resemble the real sound of the thing like in your miaow for a cat’s sound), the second e is a diacritic with a little hook at the bottom, it sounds like “un” in French, the “k” is like English “k”, “u” is similar but not the same as “oo” in book, “j” is as your “y”, and the last “e” is also a diacritic but since it’s at the end it sounds like something between “e” in pet and the French “un”, which Laura tended to pronounce as our “a”, lol. In fact out of six sounds only two were familiar to her. The rest was all blurred.

Similarly I have problems with recognising Polish names spoken by English speaking people. Even those that are short and seem easy like Walesa have practically every sound changed in the US TV news. Good that they show pictures.