Episode 4: Oh, Cholera! Oh, sickness!

O cholera! O choroba!

English Phonemes: “oh hoh-LEH-rah! oh ho-ROH-bah!”

At the top of the show, Julia answers a listener question from last week's lesson. This week's lesson is a duo of common phrases you'll hear used as polite curses, like we say "oh sugar!" or "oh, bother!" in English. Poles very commonly express frustration with polite expletives like this when they're restraining themselves from full-fledged fowl language. If one of your Polish-speaking friends stubs their toe and utters a loud "O cholera!", now you'll know why!

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A special bonus note not mentioned in the audio lesson: You'll notice that "Cholera" is capitalized as a pronoun in English, but written lowercase in Polish. In Polish, only people's names and places are capitalized. Impersonal or inanimate proper pronouns like diseases, days of the week, names of the month, etc., are written in lowercase. Fun fact!