How Do You Correctly Pronounce Polish Names?
• Believe you can do it; a lot of English names are hard for foreigners to pronounce as well! • Look up Polish names on the internet. There are several different degrees of “Pollockness”(i.e. Walter Golaski on the easy end and Władysław Taczanowski on the more challenging end). • Learn the sounds for the non-English letters in the Polish alphabet(Ą, Ć, Ń, Ó, Ś, Ź, and Ż to name a few). • Learn the consonants. he consonants B, D, F, H, K, L, M, N, P, S, Z are pronounced the same as in English; C is like an tss sound or the German ‘Z’ unless it is followed by an ‘i’, in which case it is an English ‘ch’ sound. ‘G’ is always the same as the harder English ‘G’ sound e.g. the ‘g’ in ‘git’ rather than ‘Gerald’. ‘J’ is the equivalent of the English ‘Y’; Ł is a hard one, admittedly, so Poles won’t be too offended if yo’re not 100% perfect, instead think of it as an English ‘W’ of ‘Wuh’ sound, which it loosely is, but when a ‘u’ follows it you might as well pretend the ‘Ł’ isn’t there as it is b
