I was showing mini story number 1 to a Polish friend, since the conversation had turned to ‘what tools do I use to learn’, and she pointed out that there are errors. For instance, in the third sentence in the A section, the text says ‘Przygotowuje śniadanie i pije kawę’, which she says is grammatically correct, but the voice recording says ‘Przygotowuje śniadanie i piję kawe’, which is the wrong form of the verb ‘pije’. (I’m not sure whether the last word is also wrong, or whether in practice you wouldn’t bother to enunciate the nasal diphthong at the end of ‘kawę’ and would just round it off to sounding like ‘kawe’.)
She spotted a similar mistake later on in the questions section.
I could probably correct these in the audio myself using my editing software, but I don’t know how many such errors there might be through the whole series if these ones crop up in the first story.
Might it be possible for the LingQ staff to engage someone, or indeed for any kind-spirited native Polish speaking site member, to do a check of the whole series to make sure that the text matches the audio, and note what is the correct version if one of them contains a mistake?
I would then be willing to have a go at constructing from pre-existing syllables a correct version of the audio myself if the original voice actor can’t be found to re-do the mistakes … or if she can be persuaded to re-do just the sentences that have mistakes, I’ll happily splice those in myself.
It’s quite funny mistake, it’s probably a slip of the tongue.
I gather that the narrator was reading it a few times, hence this mistake
No one actually ever pronounces ą or ę at the end of words anyway, apart from this man
I wouldn’t bother with correcting theses texts.
It’s good as it is.
Hey, I am a native speaker of Polish. Bad news is that you friend is unfortunately right. Good news is that it’s not an error a native speaker would make over and over again. I haven’t noticed it in the second recording.
OK, so basically, the nasal “o” (ą) in the word endings is non-negotiable. You should try to pronounce it.
Nasal “e” (ę) is extremely important in writing, because you use it to distinguish the 3rd person singular in some verbs (on pije) from 1st person (ja piję). HOWEVER you can (and probably should) drop it in speaking. People pronounce “chcę” as “chce” or “dziękuję” as “dziękuje” all the time. It is an established standard usage.
Adding nasals is a very unusual error, on the other hand. Nobody says things like “on chcę piwo” or “on dziękuję za kolację” unless he or she is trying too hard to be correct:)
Check out the “who is she” course as well - their pronunciation seems to me very natural in the first lesson.
Thanks. So if I edit the audio to remove the unnecessary ę sounds where the verb is in the 3rd person, but otherwise don’t worry if there is a written ę that is just pronounced as e, that should make the story a better reflection of normal speech?