Spending my morning learning how to pronounce the names of my Polish friends. It's a challenge, but at least their orthography is pretty regular - no weird shit like silent letters (I'm looking at you, FR and EN), letters that change value based on placement (RU, we need to talk about Г), weird diphthongs (NE, what's with "ij"?), or other tricks of other orthographies.
It's challenging because the sounds are not immediately obvious to a non-native speaker, but once you learn the orthography (aka spelling), it's pretty easy.
A short guide to a couple of bits for those who want to play our home game.
sz: sh
cz: ts
ł: w
ę: nasalized e
Anyway, that's enough to get you going. Start figuring out how to pronounce the names of your Polish friends! It's fun and rewarding.
It's not all that rosy though re regularity. "si" is pronounced differently depending on ~whether it's in a loanword (compare silos and silnik). "rz" is sometimes two phonemes (e.g. in marznąć or mierzić, but surprisingly enough not in obmierzły).
Your guide is imo very helpful. I'd quibble a bit about "cz", because the way I pronounce "ts" is closer to Polish "c" than to "cz". (The way I think about "cz" is that it's a more plosive "sz", but am not sure whether that's a helpful way for people who don't speak some language with similar phonetics natively.)
@robryk @oldladyplays I always provide “cheshire” as the closest english approximation of both cz and sz, by pure chance.
then again, it’s a british place name, so you can’t really tell how it’s pronounced anyway, back to square one. /hj