If you’ve already learned and practiced Polish 1 For Travel , you’ll be ready to tackle the next 12 essentials and learn Polish 2 for Travel.
These are words and phrases that’ll help you ask “Where is …?” questions – if you’re looking for the bathroom, a pharmacy, a bus stop, or the subway or railway station, a bank or an ATM.
You may also want to know if the person you’re talking with speaks German, or English – that is, one of the languages you may speak as well.
And now you can also practice with the Quizlet flashcards and games.
The Next 12 Polish Phrases: “Gdzie jest…?”
Learn and Practice Tips
- Click the black arrow to hear the Polish speaker.
- Click the red dot once to record yourself, click the black square to stop recording.
- When you click the black arrow again, you’ll hear the native speaker and then yourself.
- Do it several times until you sound like the Polish speaker
- Then “Choose a Study Mode” and test yourself with one of the Quizlet games! (You may need to adjust your Options with the top right icon
.)
Some Polish History…
Poland’s beginning can be traced back to 966, when Duke Mieszko I, ruler of several Slavic tribes, married a Bohemian princess.
His son Boleslav consolidated his power, acquired more territory and became the first legitimate king of Poland in 1025.
However, the Mieszko line died out in the 14th century. An alliance between Poland and Lithuania was eventually created through the marriage of the Polish Queen Jadwiga and the Grand Duke of Lithuania and the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth win 1569.
The Golden Age
The Polish Golden Age was the Renaissance period in Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, lasting from the late 15th century to the death of King Sigismund II Augustus, the last of the Jagiellonian Dynasty monarchs, in 1572. Some historians reckon the Polish Golden Age to have continued to the mid-17th century, when the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was ravaged by the Khmelnytsky Uprising and by the Swedish and Russian invasion. During its Golden Age, the Commonwealth became one of the largest kingdoms of Europe, stretching from modern Estonia in the north to Moldavia in the east and Bohemia in the west.
In the 16th century the Commonwealth grew to almost 1 million km², with a population of 11 million. It prospered from its enormous grain, wood, salt, and cloth exports to Western Europe via the Baltic Sea ports of Gdańsk, Elbląg, Riga, Memel, and Königsberg. The Commonwealth’s major cities included Poznań, Kraków, Warsaw, Lviv, Vilnius, Toruń, and, for a time in the 17th century, Kiev. The Commonwealth army was able to defend the realm from foreign invasion, and also participated in aggressive campaigns against Poland’s neighbors. (https://artsandculture.google.com)
World War 2
After the end of World War 2, Poland expanded to the West, while it lost territory in the east to Russia as negotiated by the Allies during the Yalta conference. (Churchill had introduced his “Matchstick solution” during a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin in Teheran already in 1943. see Map above , courtesy of Wikipedia)
It’s estimated that over 5 million Poles (among them many Jews) lost their lives during the war. The required resettling of about 2 million people, the inefficient communist system and its status as a vassal state of the Soviet Union resulted in more difficult times for Poland thereafter.
After the Cold War
In the 1980’s the Polish Solidarity movement started to push for changes. With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end off the Cold War in 1989 the Third Republic was formed.
Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2014. As the title picture shows Warsaw has become a modern city in the last 30 years.
The 2019 election saw the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) keep it’s comfortable majority in parliament. The party’s leader, Jaroslav Kaczynski, has repeatedly cited Viktor Urban’s Hungary and Erdogan’s Turkey as models to follow. His “illiberal revolution”, may create further headaches for the EU.