My talk at TEDxKrakow contained one throw-away observation which raised warm applause from the massed Polish audience.

I said that I had studied various languages. Polish is the only one which teaches you the verb 'to complain' - narzekać  - as one of the first words in the textbook to learn:

narzekać {vb} (also: skarżyć się, użalić się, żalić się, skarżyć) to complain

 

narzekać {vb} (also: skarżyć się na) to complain about

 

narzekać {vb} (also: gderać, dokuczać) to nag

 

narzekać {vb} (also: biadolić to kvetch {vb} [Amer.] [coll.]

On a different note: I was watching the video of Your TEDxKraków speech and showed it to my fiancee, who teaches Polish for foreigners.

I showed her especially the part about complaining in Polish. She liked it very much and went through every Polish teaching book she owns, and that's true - there is complaining in the first lesson in all of them! :)

Why is this? What is happening here?

Why would the people who write Polish language textbooks for use by foreigners - who presumably are expected to come to Poland - teach them the verb to complain, as opposed to (say) the verbs to praise, to enjoy, to love, to appreciate or to ask for more?

What profound instinct of pessimism or even national self-loathing is revealed here?

OK, for all I know narzekać is (as far as Poles see it) a handy regular verb, and so suitable for use with foreigners dipping their first toes in the dark swamp of Polish grammar and linguistic complexities.

But is it really the only such regular verb? And even if so, doesn't it send a disturbing signal to people learning Polish - that this one word is so important in everyday life when you visit Poland and speedily encounter so many terrible things that they want you to learn it first?

You have to go quite deep into Serbo-Croat before you bump into žaliti se.

Poles! Answer this question for a stunned world: how do you explain the prominence of narzekać in your foreign language textbooks?

* * * * *