Since June 2004, foreigners and Polish citizens residing permanently abroad may certify their command of Polish as a foreign language with a state certificate of language proficiency. In 2015, the PFL certification system underwent thorough changes. A new Państwowa Komisja do spraw Poświadczania Znajomości Języka Polskiego jako Obcego (State Commission for the Certification of Proficiency in Polish as a Foreign Language) was appointed, and entities authorised for conducting examinations were established in compliance with the amended laws. One of them is the University of Warsaw with the highest number of examinees taking the “new” certification examination to date at four levels (B1–C2). Interest in certifying one’s command of Polish is constantly growing and the aim of this paper is to present the scale of this undertaking in the Authorised Entity University of Warsaw against other examination centres.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the most common errors made by Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking students learning Polish as a foreign language as well as their causes. Slavic languages, despite numerous similarities, differ considerably. A command of one language from a given language group makes it easier to learn another one from the same group. However, knowledge of one Slavic language could also hamper the process of learning. The major causes of errors are considered to be interlanguage homonymy and the influence of negative interference. Incorrect pronunciation, in turn, causes problems with writing, that is spelling mistakes. People who know other Slavic languages often use words non-existent in Polish. A large number of the errors are syntactic ones.
Difficulties in learning Polish as a foreign language by people from the East fall within the scope of interest of glottodidacticians. This paper is an attempt at a practical approach to the subject matter. The presented language material was derived from two texts that were prepared specifically as an element of an educational experiment. Its intention was to check the effectiveness of the contrastive method in teaching foreign languages. The paper focuses on three issues related to teaching noun inflection, which cause problems to speakers of Belarusian and Russian. It presents and discusses language errors being examples of interlingual interference. In accordance with the findings made in the paper, the most common cause of errors is the influence of Russian, and Belarusian at times contributes to error fossilisation.
The paper presents an analysis of the levels of language awareness as expressed by representatives of the first generation of Polish Canadians (university students) based on their opinions on English elements in contemporary Polish. The author cites the arguments used to evaluate borrowings and interprets them in the light of sociolinguistic conditions. In the studied material, reasonable arguments prevail over judgments based on intuition and aesthetics, and the respondents refer to bilingualism, multiculturalism and the secondary function of the Polish language. At the highest level of language awareness, they indicate language standardisation relying on their knowledge of the communication settings.
The aim of this paper is to present Zbiór rzeczy… (A collection…) by Michał Dudziński as a reliable source of knowledge of the north borderland Polish language. The author, guided by his own sense of language standard and Thesaurus by G. Knapius, considered all that deviated from the standard incorrect. And since his language experience resulted from contacts with the north borderland Polish language, he recorded words characteristic of this regional variant of Polish as incorrect ones in his work. The north borderland regionalisms recorded by the author include: I) the borderland words of the a) Belarusian, b) Ukrainian- Belarusian (with a broader range, recorded also in sources from the south borderland) origin, II) archaisms, and III) vocabulary common to the north borderland and Polish dialects, IV) a) phonetic, b) morphological, and c) lexical innovations resulting from language
interference.
The paper points to the intensive advancement of research on multi-word language units, that is phrasemes, which has prevailed for a few decades now and is currently supported by text digitalisation and development of corpus linguistics. However, the noticeable interest in phrasematics among researchers does not involve the north borderland Polish language. The authors of studies of the vocabulary coming from the north-east borderland either fail to mention phrasemes at all or record scarce and, apparently, random multi-word wholes or, at best, dedicate blatantly small chapters to
multiword units (in comparison to chapters devoted to the discussion of single words). The lack of extensive records of the north borderland (both historical and contemporary) phrasematics prevents the presentation of a fully satisfying description of the north borderland phrasemes.
The authors of this paper presented the problem on the example of the word wholes indicated in the title and realised in north borderland texts, such as e.g. in the form im mniej, the general Polish equivalent of which is jak najmniej (as little as possible), cf. Z nią trzeba im mniej mieć do czynienia and the general Polish version Z nią trzeba jak najmniej mieć do czynienia (You should have as little to do with her as possible), and indicated them to be lithuanisms. Interestingly, however, the phrasemes (36) have occurred in one monthly only over 20 years and the authors are not aware of any other source to acknowledge them. They are also absent from the fi les containing a few thousand north borderland multiword units the authors have at their disposal.
The subject matter of the paper falls into the field of interlanguage contacts and concerns Korean lexis in the form of an extensive set of borrowings, references and quotations in the book titled Korea. Klucz Dalekiego Wschodu (Korea. The key of the Far East) of 1905 by Wacław Sieroszewski. It is at the same time the first example of adapting Korean words as heard or read by the author in their phonetic form to the Polish language. These are words representing various categories of lexis, including common words, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, some idioms and conversational phrases, as
well as proper names, toponyms and anthroponyms. Sieroszewski mixes various spelling conventions modelled also on early (mainly Russian and English) transcription systems of Korean. Sieroszewski’s limited knowledge of Korea’s language position resulted also in Japanised forms of some toponyms in his text.
