Polish, as I understand it

Following on from yesterday's stony theme. Today's broadens from stone to geographical features.  Clue: Przylądek w pd. Chile .  Firstly, pd. is an abbreviation of południe (south).  Przylądek is a cape as in a large / high headland that juts out into a body of water.  An example of this, found in south Chile, is Cape Horn. Answer: Horn. In working this one out, I learned that another word for a headland in Polish is cypel , which is a very narrow headland, like Hel on the Baltic coast of Poland. And for a peninsula, the polish word would be  półwysep . As far as I can see in both English and Polish, peninsula / półwysep is a broad term for a landform projecting into a body of water that covers cypel and przylądek Elsewhere in the crossword book, there was a clue involving archipelago.  The Polish word, archipelag , being very similar.  I was aware that it described a collection of numerous small islands, but not much more than that. The word seems t...

Happy New Year! Szczęśliwego nowego roku! It's a new year and a new blog.  I'm getting used to the layout and it would seem that for ease of finding my notes, I would be best putting them in pages rather than in blog posts.  So what shall I put in blog posts?  Perhaps rough notes made on the hoof?  Perhaps confessions of gaffs I make as I attempt to use Polish. The first gaff was in calling out a Polish surname.  I hadn't started to learn the language at this point and had only been given a few pointers.  All I had grasped was that sz was a bit like our sh  and cz  was a bit like our ch .  So, faced with the name Pycz, I confidently stride out to call it out.  What I know now, is that there is a very clear difference between shouting Pycz and Picz.  One will attract the attention of the barer of the name, the other will attract quite the wrong sort of attention.  Picz, I am reliably informed, is not at all polite.

These days, one  as a pronoun, tends to be avoided by the English masses, perhaps because it is viewed as sounding pretentious, but for most people it has been replaced by y ou  without much confusion when in context. A Polish friend once told me there is no direct equivalent to one in Polish.  I assume the Polish don't literally say, for example, where do you buy books  (when meaning where does one buy books) which would be Gdzie kupujesz książki?   Which I believe only means, where does the person you are asking buy books?  So, if that's no good and we can't ask where does one buy books?  then a different phrasing is required. Where are books bought?  Typed into Google Translate comes up with Gdzie kupuje się książki?  kupuje is conjugated as for the third person, as you would for one as a pronoun How is bread made? Jak się robi chleb? again, robi is the conjugation for the third person and się pops up again So się acts lik...