What do days mean to you?

Here is a piece of interesting information which I got to know yesterday. Mondays I have my Polish language class. When we learn a new language, we tend to pick up the most commonly used words / sentences at the very starting stages. The same way, I learnt the greetings, names of the days, months, and so on even before I started with my classes. Thanks to google translate!

The fact that all my classmates have decided to discontinue the polish class has made me more committed to my classes. I do not want to let that feeling creep inside me. I have been trying to do all that I can to make this difficult language seem interesting. As part of my creative adventures, I compiled a dictionary ofpolish words that I know. I was amazed to see that I knew close to 350 words. This amusement was more so because, I had 350 words without counting the number names of 1 to 100 :)

During yesterday’s revision session I was reading out the words to check if my pronunciation was correct. I have this mixed feeling during my polish lessons. Mypolish teacher teaches English at the university and his teaching follows very high standards of grammar. I keep wondering that I may end up with better English at the end of my so called Polish training. At the same time, I also feel my English pronunciation, for that matter even recognition of sounds may suffer as Polish has some strange pronunciations for the letters are the same as in English. “J” is pronounced as “Ya”, “L” is pronounced as “va” and there 3 “Z”s with very slight variations. Just imagine reading “Jam” as “yam” and seeing a Yam in a bottle!

As I read through the days of the week, he asked me I knew their meaning. I wondered, “meaning”? Then I recalled that it is quite the same in Tamil where “Nyaayiru” for Sunday also means “The Sun”. Then he went on to explain. I felt it was an interesting piece of information to share.

Polish word	How to read	What it means	English
Niedziela	Nia-giala	No work	Sunday
Poniedzialek	Po-nia-gavek	After no work day	Monday
Wtorek	w-to-rek	Second day	Tuesday
Sroda	Sr-oo-da	Middle day	Wednesday
Czwartek	Sh-war-tek	Fourth day	Thursday
Pietek	Pien-tek	Fifth day	Friday
sobota	So-bo-ta		Saturday

Wasn't it simple. After knowing the secret meaning of these words, I felt I was able to remember them more easily. There is no special meaning for Saturday !