Brzmi podobnie, ale są zupełnie różne

Brzmi podobnie, ale są zupełnie różne

Do you ever get misjudged by others for who you are based on your appearance? Well this has happen to me so many times. Frequently whenever I am in public and when I speak Polish to my parents (they ignore me if I do not), someone in the public would assume that my family and I are Russian.  In kasia’s blog which she titled TKR blog post #2: Russia hating gives an example of this race identification error when she spoke about the event in the restaurant for someone’s birthday.

“What language are you speaking in?”
I told him that we were speaking in Polish.
“Is that where you are from? Poland?” He asked us. We told him yes- that we were one hundred percent Polish.
“Oh, I am so sorry for mistreating you!” He exclaimed. “I thought you were speaking Russian. I thought you were from Russia!”

 We always correct them stating that we are purely POLISH, not RUSSIAN, because to me personally I feel insulted in a sense. Racists or not, Russian leaders have frequently been doing wrong cruel things like torturing Poland throughout history, so having a nationality like that prevents having pride in the leaders of the past.There is a difference between Polish and Russian. True both languages are Slavic and might have a few words that sound alike the other, but Poles use a Latin based alphabet with additional letters of their own (like ą, ę, ź, and ł) while Russia has a total different system of its own. To prove my point I will compare the phrase “how are you?” between the two Slavic languages.

Russian: Как поживаете?

Polish: Jak się masz?

You can easily see a huge difference between the two. The two languages sound and look different from one another. It is like comparing the Japanese language with the Chinese language. Poles and Russians have been hating each other and treating each other as opposite races for centuries so the great difference between the two languages is very easy to understand.