Including full-frontal from Mikołajczak, whoever she is. I dread her becoming a star, thus requiring that I learn how to spell her name.
Polish title of the series: Niepewność
Weronika Janosz
Monika Mikołajczak
Weronika Janosz and Aleksandra Piotrowska were topless in episode 1. The link also includes info about the series.
I was curious so I looked it up.
Mick-o-LIE-chalk
It should be mee-ko-WHY-chock
You probably typed in an l rather than a ł
Polish, my birth language at which I now suck, isn’t as difficult as it looks once you learn the orthography. They just jumble consonants together to make new sounds, like we do in English with ch. To our eyes, the “ajcz” looks unpronounceable, but it isn’t, as you found out. It’s just eye-ch (one syllable, not two), basically the same English sound found in hIGH CHair (dropping the beginning “h” and the trailing “air,” as shown)
Approximate conversions to American English
ł = English w
cz = English ch
aj = English long i (kind of)
i = English long e
others not used in this example:
rz = English zh, as in Zhivago
sz = English sh
j = English y when starting a word
w = English v
c = English ts
ą = English on as in “on the table”
ę = English en
e = English long a (Approximately. It’s complicated.)
I may be forgetting some of them. Of course I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the gist of it
Making it a little easier is the fact that almost every Polish word is stressed on the penultimate syllable, which makes the names a little friendlier than Russian names, where the stresses are not predictable for a non-native speaker.
I sometimes guess wrong about Polish pronunciations when I see names written in English. Examples are Lech Walesa and Iga Swiatek. Both of those last names have an “n” sound in them, but I had assumed that Walesa’s e and Swiatek’s a were just a and e. Our media sources usually transliterate ą and a the same. Same with ę and e. Same with ł and l, as I think you may have discovered.
And there are some Polish sounds that I speak with a heavy American accent, even when I try my best, despite the fact that I probably pronounced them correctly when I was a pre-schooler.
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And I still don’t want to learn how to spell any more Polish names.
In this case *mee-ko-WHY-chak. There are two similar surnames in Poland, Mikołajczak and Mikołajczuk.
On reflection, I went back and changed it to “chock” for czak. I don’t want to use chak, because Americans might pronounce that to rhyme with “shack.”
I think the closest is probably
czak = chock
czuk = chook, rhyming with book
That sounds about right to me, but my ear ain’t perfect!
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I get your point. Thanks.
“I dread her becoming a star, thus requiring that I learn how to spell her name.”
Copy and paste my friend. Copy and paste. 🙂
PR