h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Getting drunk with the locals would seem to be the best way of learning spoken Poolish as the language is easier slurred than spoken from a sober viewpoint.
For written Polish, simply replace avery other vowel with a z, make the v's inot w and the w sounds into an l with a slash through it...and your sorted.

(P.S. Nice article Could do with expansion - after all, if my mother can make a career out of this then you'd think there'd be more to it )

...Make a living out of getting drunk with the locals? No, be serious, it can't be... if it is, please ask your mother to tell me how ASAP.

It must then be either writing articles for the Guide (hmm...) or teaching Polish. Which?

No, go on your first instinct. I speak good German after a few beers,several African languages after the local brew and my Polish after a few vodkas is spectacular. My Chinese never gets beyond a very elementary stage becuase I cannot stand Dragon wine and most Chinese can't drink.
Duncan is actually remembering a residential course in Poland (where I was teaching English to adults) where the evening sessions involved really silly games in the bar and there were heavy fines / forfeits for speaking Polish even at 2 in the morning. Some of my students went from absolute beginner to Proficiency in four years and some of them formed an English club afterwards to drink and speak English in the bars of Gdansk

It turns out that I shall be in Poland next week to try this out. I may need my Polish dictionary as I'm out there on my tod and they're not putting me in the Marriot.
(Apparently the office has moved to ul. Marsałkowska and its too far away....)

Anyway all you need to know is "Czy mówi pani po angielsku?" (followed by copious display of US dollars ).

The getting drunk with the locals can often be less than successful if your native language is English, simply because, in northern Europe at least, the majority of people learn English, and will speak to you in English rather than have you struggle through their language.
The extent of this varies though. In Scandanavia most people speak as good English as any Briton or American. They ssem consider English as the international language which everyone should know (I've even seen Swediah people amased that some Spaniards had been 'too lazy' to learn English) and other languages as of use only within their own country.
Germans have a similar attitude, although the level of English is not as good as Scandanavia - actually Germany almost has it's own dialect of English because they way in which most Germans speak English is consistent with each other although not like a native speaker speaks. If you speak German with an English accent they'll very often start speaking to you in English, which makes getting drunk with the locals difficult. This is nice, because they try to help you, but irritating because it makes practicing the language difficult (and you feel you're in the same category as 'stupid foreigner that han't speak the language'.
In the Netherlands almost everyone can speak fluent English (and French and German), yet if you try speaking Dutch, they'll let you, and are probably quite pleased you've made the effort (and if you can speak English and German it's easy because it's very much a mixture of the two (linguistically)).

Oh I agree [nice to see this thread back on my home space] I think the Dutch are brilliant: I can't understand why they don't rule the world - probably got more sense. Amsterdam is one of the best places I've ever been. They can code switch too - caryy on in several langauges in the same conversation.
My best friend was an Englishman who had a Dutch mother. Before his death, about 5 years ago, he could speak all the languages of the European Union (he wasn't a linguist by profession, but a chemical engineer)

It makes you realise how lazy the anglophone part of the world is, in that most English and Americans can't speak any other language. I belive the French are quite bad in this respect as well.
Some Germans I was speaking to were actually surprised that you can learn German at school in England, because so few English people can.

A thought that occured to me a while ago:
How many of these people who have learnt Klingon can actually speak more than one 'real' languge? I know I'd chose Japanese over Klingon if I had the time to learn another language.

Ah oui, tu as raison.

Qué?

Sorry, French is not one of the two languages I can manage fluently. I gather I have something - reason?
If I was Dutch I would of understood. Or French, of course.

Something I was thinking about the other day:

There are languages such as Chinese and ancient Egyptian which use ideogrammes instead of a phonetic alphabet. Couldn't something along these lines be devised so that people speaking different languages could write using such ideogrammes in a way that everyone understands? I suppose the practice would be much more complicated than the theory, as anything even remotely abstract is probably culture-dependant.

Would be cool if it worked though.

Written Chinese is incredibly difficult, (even for Chinese speakers - there's an awful lot of characters) but it does serve as a lingua franca all over the far East. I think English has much too long a head start for any other language to have a hope of being a world language. When I first started teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) other languages were necessary if yoiu wanted to travel alone but now you can go a very long way with English alone

I was thinking maybe ascii ideogrammes might word - a sort of internationalised shorthand, that could be read by anyone who's learnt it. Some of it's there already as every country and language has a two letter ISO code.
A simple example, assuing 'A' means first person singular, i.e. in English 'I/me'
A <- en
could mean I come from England, whereby '<-' is a general from/of preposition.
Obviously that's a very simple example. But you've got to start somewhere.

Just wondering a bit here:
Getting to know a few words of the language of whichever country you are visiting is a good thing, it will enable you to get further on with your language studies, if you so wish, or enable you to ask a few simple questions, maybe such as 'Do you speak English/French/German?'. And people tend to react in a friendly manner if you at least try to learn a bit of their language.

But when 'getting drunk with the locals' how come you will often learn the less than polite side of conversation first, I mean, in Gaelic, I only know how to say 'pog mo thon' and I am thankful that very few outside Ireland will know what it means, should I accidentially say those words in a crowded pub.

Good job you don't drink in my pub then. I know what it means from the "folk" group of that name.

Well, I picked up the words from a CD I have with 'The Dubliners', they don't say what it means, but a friend thought he knew, and I have since had it confirmed by a few Irish people at work.

Next time I go to Ireland (whenever that may be) I will probably stick to English.

My other half taught Irish, but I know better than to refer this conversation to her .

Probably a wise move!

An Irish pub here in Luxembourg town just won a friendly tournament of Cricket a couple of weeks ago.

As they did not expect to beat the English at their own game they thought they might as well have some fun with the team's name, so they entered the thing as 'Pog Mo Thon' from the pub 'The Black Stuff'.

Seeing that they actually went and won the bloody thing, actually beating the English just make their name funnier.