English is a Germanic language, and has a lot of affinity with German, Dutch, Danish, in vocabulary and grammar. Thanks to those nice French guys who showed up in 1066 and offered to help run things we have points of congruency with the romance languages, French, Latin. Thanks to them we have synonyms tied to most of Western Europe.
- kingly from Old English,
- royal from French and
- regal from Latin.
Slavic languages, like Polish, don't share any of those lineages. Which can be disheartening because the vocabulary can be pretty alien. So it's comforting when you see something familiar, like a nice reminder that it's still an Indo-European language and ultimately shares roots with the others after all.
Like the "I am, you are, he is" forms of "to be" in French, my old high school Latin, and Polish.
je suis nous somme sum summus jestem jesteśmy
tu es vous etes est estis jesteś jesteście
il est ils sont et sunt jest są (pron. "saum")
But I asked the interwebs today how long all this was going to take, and it looks like we're talking 500-1000 hours to learn a language to even a starting level of proficiency. I wonder if I'll be able to do it? I've probably only logged 50 hours on it so far.
