Welcome!

Welcome to the Editing Perfection Blog!

This weblog (or “blog” for short) is intended to help the users of Editing Perfection answer any questions they might have about the corrections made on their documents.  It will take a look at some of the common problems Polish students encounter when they use English, and will give suggestions and reminders how to overcome these problems.

Many people who want to learn a foreign language think that the new language is basically the same as their own language—that only the words are different.  For instance, if we want to say Ja jestem chory, we can just change each word to its English counterpart: I am ill.  This is sometimes true, especially if the new language and the old are part of the same language family.  In most cases, though, the languages are very different in many ways—like English and Polish.  For instance, if we want to say Mam trzydzieści lat, changing the words to English—Have thirty years—will not work.  The new English sentence is meaningless.

English and Polish are related—they are both members of the Indo-European family of languages—but they are like very distant cousins.  Early English was similar to German, Swedish, Danish, and many other languages of the so-called “Germanic” group.  Later on, English was strongly influenced by French as a result of the Norman invasion of 1066.  Polish, on the other hand, is a Slavic language, related to Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and others.

The next blog entry will discuss some of the main areas of difference between English and Polish.