Polish Worship

The town I live in is right on the Czech-Polish border. Therefore, most of the people in my town can speak Polish as well as Czech. This is especially true of the people in my church. Most of the sermons are in Czech, but occasionally the sermons will be in Polish. There is also this unusual dialect in our town called Ponasimu (sp?). It is a mix between Czech and Polish and sometimes when someone shares their testimony in church they speak Ponasimu. Learning Czech is hard enough, but with all these other languages floating around, it is brutal.

This leads me to my point. Every week, at least half of our worship is in Polish. In fact, even our Hymnal is in Polish. It is really fuuny, because I have not studied Polish at all, but yet, I learn it every Sunday at church. It is close enough to Czech, where I can recognize some words, but it is different enough to where I definitely struggle when I try to sing.

To me, Polish sounds like this, "Shush wosh blush slush wosh." Lots of shushes and wushes...

Sometimes when I am attempting to sing in Polish, I think to myself, "Self, what if everyone just stopped singing and I was left singing by myself. All they would hear would be a whole bunch of non-sense that sounds like "sush mush bush Bog (the word for God) wush blush shush."

Oh, the cross-cultural life.