Salutations

Dzień dobry - Good day (formal) - can be used at any time of day

Dobry wieczór - Good evening

Dobranoc - Goodnight 

Cześć - Hello

Hej - hey

Witam - Hello - A bit more formal than cześć - used when you are not familiar with the person / people you are greeting.

Witaj - Hello - Used when you are greeting one person you are familiar with.

Witajcie - used when greeting multiple people you are familiar with.

Serwus - Hello - colloquial

Do widzenia - Good bye (formal)

Do zobaczenia - See you later

Do zobaczenia w piątek - See you on Friday

Cześć - Bye

Pa - Bye

Pa pa - Bye bye

Do jutro -  See you tomorrow

Spadam - I'm off (I'm falling) see ya

Uciekam - I'm off (running) see ya

Na razie - So long (for now)

Nara - a contraction of na razie, considered impolite by some

Żegnam - A formal and possibly final goodbye or farewell - at a funeral, priest would say:

- Żegnamy dzisiaj...  "Today we say goodbye..."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To get a cob on - co to znaczy?

Image
To get a cob on ... what does it mean and where did the expression come from? Po prostu, -  get a cob on -  to znaczy wpadać w złość / być w złym humorze. Most English people will be familiar with this expression, to get a cob on is to be annoyed, to be in a bad mood. The word cob is an old word to describe something rounded or globular, a lump of something.  This explains the use of cob in the expression I'm sweating cobs which means the beads of sweat are large. Cobble stones on old roads owe their name to this meaning too. Cob also describes the cylindrical shoot on which grains of maize / corn grow, hence: corn on the cob. How about the origin of the expression to get a cob on ?  Well, I guess there will be plenty of theories, but the official line from the Oxford English Dictionary is that the origin is unknown.  It has been seen in print as early as 1937, in E. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang .
Read more

Sandwich from mosquitoes

Image
A sandwich (kanapka) in Poland, tends to be an open sandwich; toppings sitting on a slice of bread, like a large canapé. In fact the word kanapka is the diminutive form of kanapa (sofa) which itself comes from the French word, canapé, for sofa. Its resemblance to the word canopy is no mere coincidence. A mosquito net over a bed was called a canopy from the Ancient Greek word, konops, for mosquito. Over time the word for the canopy over the bed, came to be used for the bed itself, then finally came to mean sofa. So the toppings of canapés and kanapki sit on little beds of bread.  I first heard the etymology of canapé from Something Rhymes with Purple , a splendid podcast by Susie Dent and Gyles Brandreth. 
Read more

Breakfast - Śniadanie

Image
Breakfast!  The most important meal of the day.  To the outside world we start our day with a full English here in Blighty.  I know I would every day given half the chance.  Bacon, eggs, sausage, tomatoes, toast... a bit of black pudding if I'm lucky - kaszanka in Polish.  But most days, like most Brits, I will have cereal for breakfast.  How about the Polish, what is a typical breakfast, typowe śniananie? In my head I have it that a common breakfast is kanapki , what we might call open sandwiches or - if we follow etymological routes - giant canapés (the two words have the same origin, see this post on the origin of the words canapé and kanapka .) or maybe a plate of scrambled eggs, jajecznica . I remember, as a student on the French exchange, being surprised by how homogenous the world had become.  I naively expected croissant to be the morning plat du jour, but found that breakfast cereals were the thing.  So how about Poland, is it often brea...
Read more