Many Poles will tell you that Polish is a phonetic language. In other words, you read it as you write it. Cool! Sounds easy enough, right? But hold on a sec. That’s not entirely true. While written Polish might indeed be easier to decipher than for example English (just think about the many different ways you can read the letter “a” in English), it has its own set of funky spelling problems. As any child in Poland can tell you, there is nothing more hideous in this world than Polish orthography. And unfortunately that orthography is directly tied into how we pronounce Polish words.
Take these two vowels, for example:
u and ó
They both sound exactly the same, like “oo” in English.
Or this pair:
ż and rz
Again, exactly the same sound in both cases, similar to the French “j” in “Je” (as in “Je t’aime”). Except, when the “rz” combination is pronounced separately as “r”+”z”. Not very often, but it does happen.
Or this pair:
h and ch
They both sound like “h”.
). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 