Consider the word: BID-goh-sh-ch (\ˈbid-ˌgȯsh(ch)\). This is a geographical word, and refers to a city in central Poland. The correct spelling of this word is Bydgoszcz! That is probably not the first spelling that comes to mind when you hear the pronunciation.
For many spellers, tackling Polish is a difficult and daunting task. The consonant pairings can be unfamiliar to many native English speakers, especially when they’re pronounced so strangely.
However, there are some pretty simple tricks to nailing Polish words like “Bydgoszcz”. The four main letter combinations that confuse spellers are dz, sz, cz, and rz. Here are the pronunciations of these digraphs:
dz – \ j \ as in Rendzina (audio), Lodz (audio), Grudziadz (audio) or Brudzinski sign (audio)
sz – \ sh \ as in Bydgoszcz (audio), Cieszyn (audio), Kalisz (audio) or Koszalin (audio)
cz – \ ch \ as in Czestochowa (audio), Dabrowa Gornicza (audio), Szczecin (audio) or Szczecinski Zalew (audio)
rz – \ zh \ as in Jastrzebie-Zdroj (audio), Rzeszow (audio), Walbrzych (audio) or Zabrze (audio)
Additionally, when faced with the choice of using a ‘y’ or ‘i’, remember that the long vowel \ ē \ almost always goes ‘i’, while the short vowel \ i \ goes y, especially between two consonants. The letter ‘y’ is never directly before or after the letter ‘c’ or a vowel in words derived from Polish.
In the next post, I’ll discuss some special Polish letters that have unique pronunciations.