Publisher's Synopsis
This dictionary contains over 12,700 word pairs in English and Polish. We also publish companion volumes with paired Portuguese, French, Hebrew German, Yiddish and other languages. This dictionary is derived from our WordsRUs system. Visit our website at www.wordsrus.info for availability of the other volumes. Polish is the official language of Poland, a country of 38.5 million people and is also used by the 10 million Polish diaspora around the world. Polish is a West Slavic language and the closest similar languages are those of Poland's neighbors: Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian. The latter two are actually more easily understood by a speaker of Polish, even though they have somewhat different interpretations of the Latin alphabet. It is understood and can be used for communication in the western parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Polish has been called one of the three most difficult languages to learn, the other two being Chinese and Hungarian. The Polish people are strongly Roman Catholic although in recent years they have become less attached to the church in their social lives. Historically the language is strongly influenced by Latin and in the past hundred years by Russian. It also shares many loanwords with German because of its physical proximity. The Polish people do their own thing with spellings of words however, particularly with word endings, but once you begin to study the words you will find a surprising number of cognates (words with similar sounds, meanings, and etymology).
