Polish-English False Friends Vol. 2
Some time ago I shared with you a list of words that sound similar in both English and Polish but have very different meanings, so-called ‘false friends’ HERE. As I said the previous time, it’s just impossible to compile a full list of the kind, it would be simply very long. I also focused on words you’re most likely to encounter as students. Today I’d like to expand that list a bit with words that are equally common and remain confusing for many learners. Let’s go!
The first word is list – it means a 'letter' (written message) and it is used only when talking about letters you receive by post. There’s no other meaning associated with this word. English ‘list’ is lista – ‘a number of items written consecutively’. Examples: lista zakupów – ‘shopping list’, lista przebojów – ‘music chart’ (such as radio’s top 10).
Pensja doesn’t mean ‘pension’ but ‘salary’. This word means also ‘finishing school’, it’s not used very often nowadays but you may still encounter it in the literature. In this context we call it most often ‘boarding school’, that is internat in Polish. As for ‘pension’, in Polish it’s emerytura, 'to go to pension' – pójść na emeryturę, a male pensioneer is emeryt, a female one emerytka.
Another tricky one is realizować (and its perfective counterpart zrealizować). It isn’t very easy to render its meaning with just one word but it could be simply translated as ‘to execute’. It’s very often used in formal language to say ‘make an order’ (as in an online store) – zrealizować zamówienie, if you’re a dreamer, you definitely want to make your dreams come true – zrealizować marzenia. ‘To realize something’ is to zdać sobie z czegoś sprawę. ‘I realized that Polish is very easy’ – Zdałam sobie sprawę, że polski jest bardzo łatwy.
This one might not exactly be a false friend but it definitely is a tricky word too – ważny. It means both ‘important’ and ‘valid’. Mam ważną sprawę – ‘I have an important issue’ and Wciąż mam ważny bilet – ‘I still have a valid ticket’, both sentences use the same word but the meanings are very different. Recently I’ve heard a Polish bank clerk telling a foreign customer in English that their account wasn’t important anymore – the customer was really baffled!
A word you may hear quite often is audycja. As you can imagine it has nothing to do with English ‘audition’. Polish audycja means ‘radio show’ – audycja radiowa. If you’d like to talk about an ‘audition’, you could use the word przesłuchanie (used also for court or police hearing) or simply use the English word casting.
Finally, the word komplement. It means ‘compliment’. You will often hear the expression ‘to pay compliments’ which in Polish is prawić komplementy, to ‘take compliments’ is przyjmować komplementy (literally: 'accept'), for example: nie umiem przyjmować komplementów – ‘I don’t know how to take compliments’ or: uznam to za komplement – ‘I’ll take that as a compliment’.
I hope you learned something useful from this short list. Let me know on the forums if you ever heard any of these words – did you understand them right away or did you get in any funny situation? I’m curious to hear that! I wish you happy learning and many komplementy on your Polish!
David, OLS Community Manager – Polish