PROBLEMY FONETYCZNE SŁOWEŃCÓW UCZĄCYCH SIĘ JĘZYKA POLSKIEGO
PHONETIC PROBLEMS OF SLOVENIANS LEARNING POLISH

Summary/Abstract: The article shows certain phonetic difficulties encountered by Slovene students during the initial stages of learning Polish. These learners face a number of pronunciation-related problems resulting from various phenomena occurring in Polish, including variation across different registers (cf. standard pronunciation fízyka ‘physics’, vernacular pronunciation fizýka), the realization of nasal vowels (cf. wziął ‘he took’, pączek ‘doughnut’, wąs ‘moustache’ [vźoÁ, poŠček, v“s]), word-final devoicing of voiced consonants (obraz ‘picture’ [obras]), or assimilations within consonant clusters (dziewczyna ‘girl, girlfriend’ [Þ'efčyna]). Furthermore, problems arise due to the differences between the native and the target language, as e.g. in the case of Polish sounds absent from the native Slovene system, such as ą, ę, or ł, di- and trigraphs corresponding to single sounds, cf. chłopak ‘boy, boyfriend’ [χÁopak], dziadek ‘grandfather’ [Þ'adek], or various graphic representations of the same phoneme, e.g. [u]: kura ‘hen’ – góra ‘mountain, top’; [χ]: hak ‘hook’ – chodzić ‘to walk’, [ž]: rzeka ‘river’ – Ŝaba ‘frog’, [ć]: ciocia ‘aunt’ – ćwiczenie ‘exercise’ – miedź ‘copper’. The article employs a comparative approach to the issues at hand and may therefore prove useful for teachers of Polish working with Slovene students.

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