Tips for learning

[TheWhiteRabbit]

Hi everyone.

I've been trying for a short time now to learn Polish, but the ways I have tried seem to not work. Does anyone have a suggestion for a better way to learn other than using a CD or Tape, or are those the best ways? There aren't any places around the town that I live in that offer a language course like this, so I don't know what else to do.

 

[Seana]

Hi TheWhiteRabbit

All I want to add - Polish is said to be a difficult language to learn for foreigners it is extremely different to your mother tounge.
Even you found something in the internet ( but yes, Lida is right there is loads of matherial) probably you couldn't learn it and use it in short time.
Polish is very rich phonetically. In spelling, one major difficulty for foreigners is the words with ż vs. rz, u vs. ó, and h vs. ch, sz, rz, cz, dż, dź, ć, ś, szcz etc. since the pairs of sounds these letters or combinations of letters represent have identical or almost identical pronunciation.
The nouns, pronouns, and adjectives have seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, and locative), meaning that the ending of the words varies according to their syntactical function in the sentence.
It is totally new for somebody with skills in some Germanic laguage.

I think apart from the internet and grammar books you should find some teacher to help you with it.

PS sorry for my unperfect English but I have the same problems to learn and use such a different language as well.

Good luck

Regards

 

[polaco]

Hello,

I agree with Seana. Polish is very complicated for someone, who speaks a germanic language. Without good teacher it is nearly impossible to learn polish, while living in other country.

Good luck/Powodzenia

ps. In which part of US you're living? Most of polish live in north - eastern part, with Chicago being number 2 in list of biggest polish cities. I belive that in such place there won't be a problem to find native speaker, who would teach you.

 

[dorsiu]

Hi, just go to this site w w w (dot) ecml (dot) at/html/polish/index.htm
greetz

 

[Seana]

Dorsiu is a junior member and he isn't allowed to sent URL
So I think it is just that he mentioned about

http://www.ecml.at/html/polish/index.htm

It is really good and I hope it will help you


Greetings

 

[Thomas1]

Hi everyone.

I've been trying for a short time now to learn Polish, but the ways I have tried seem to not work. Does anyone have a suggestion for a better way to learn other than using a CD or Tape, or are those the best ways? There aren't any places around the town that I live in that offer a language course like this, so I don't know what else to do.

Hello White Rabbit and welcome to the forums.

I guess there’s no better way to learn any language like going to a country in which it is spoken. On the other hand, I believe that nothing is impossible if you really want to learn a language.

What are you exactly working on, please? If you are learning pronunciation at the moment you may find this site handy. It’s an online synthesizer of Polish language. Tape in the words whose pronunciation you want to know and click on Odczytaj (you can punch in up to 100 characters).
I’d advise that you browse our resources and tips for learners thread, there’re lots of links for people like you.

You should also ask as many questions as many doubts you have, I’m sure there are many foreros on this forum who give you some useful information, help or advice on Polish (and not only) language.


Good luck with you Polish.

Regards,
Thomas

 

[TheWhiteRabbit]

Greetings, and thank you for your wonderful advice and suggestions.

For your information, I live about 2 and a half hours away from Chicago. I've been trying for a couple of weeks now to learn some basic Polish, the pronunciation is kind of hard to master. I plan to travel abroad someday, especially to Poland. My family itself is of Polish descent, almost completely on my mother's side, and somewhat on my father's.

Once again, thank you for you kind suggestions and advice, I will use it to further my knowledge.

Dziękuję

 

[übermönch]

Perhaps you can find some comix in Polish somewhere (on the internet?); it helped me learning the language quite a lot, since there you approximitaly know what it's all about. There's also Slovio, a simple artificial slavic language which, as some claim, makes learning all those complicated slavic languages easier and is itself easy to learn.

 

[downfallofutopia]

I am starting to learn polish. I tried teaching myself German and was very successful, but I left for the Navy before I could achieve any real level of competence. I've always wanted to learn either Polish or Slovak. I decided on Polish because I have friends that speak Polish and my grandparents who speak quite a bit of Slovak understand Polish. Does anyone have any tips on learning. I am having a lot of trouble with the cases of nouns. Also I have Rosetta Stone (which I don't really like and bought a course book to supplement it), and I have noticed that some of the nouns change their case depending on whether or not it is a negated statement ( chłopiec ma na sobie buty / chłopiec nie ma na sobie butów ), and when dealing with the amount of windows on a house ( jeden okno, dwa okna, pięc okny <=== I think that was the ending they used ). If anyone knows of any useful programs, resources, or techniques I would be very grateful.

P.S. - I've tried asking my grandparents to teach me, but when they tried they couldn't they said it was just natural and they didn't think things out that way. My friends have been of some help but they say the same thing as my grandparents.

 

[Jana337]

Hi and welcome!

I am merging your question with an older thread. Please have a look at our resources and at the book some of us use to learn Polish.

Jana

 

[downfallofutopia]

I have spent some time reading the forums, and they are really great. I tried the polish synthesizer and for some reason my comp won't play it, I might have to update my quicktime player.

 

[chung]

I am starting to learn polish. I tried teaching myself German and was very successful, but I left for the Navy before I could achieve any real level of competence. I've always wanted to learn either Polish or Slovak. I decided on Polish because I have friends that speak Polish and my grandparents who speak quite a bit of Slovak understand Polish. Does anyone have any tips on learning. I am having a lot of trouble with the cases of nouns. Also I have Rosetta Stone (which I don't really like and bought a course book to supplement it), and I have noticed that some of the nouns change their case depending on whether or not it is a negated statement ( chłopiec ma na sobie buty / chłopiec nie ma na sobie butów ), and when dealing with the amount of windows on a house ( jeden okno, dwa okna, pięc okny <=== I think that was the ending they used ). If anyone knows of any useful programs, resources, or techniques I would be very grateful.

P.S. - I've tried asking my grandparents to teach me, but when they tried they couldn't they said it was just natural and they didn't think things out that way. My friends have been of some help but they say the same thing as my grandparents.

If you don't mind learning with drills, there are a few good workbooks in the series "Jezyk polski dla cudzoziemcow" (Polish for foreigners) published by Universitas that will give you some practice:

Przygoda z gramatyka (focuses on declension of nouns and adjectives)
Isc czy jechac? (focuses on verbs of motion)
Czas na czasownik (focuses on verbs)
Co z czym? (focuses on word order)
Liczba tez liczy (focuses on numbers and words of quantity)

I've picked up several books from this series when I have been in Poland and they are very helpful and have answer keys for the exercises.

You can buy these books from Polish bookstores. There're a couple of bookstores in the USA that sell books from this series online:

xxx

Jana has also provided some good links when she merged your question with the older thread. The link to the online Polish course by Oscar Swan is excellent. Unfortunately, Professor Swan still hasn't got around to adding the audio for the dialogues of the second half of the textbook. I sent an email to him last year about the missing audio, and he replied that he was trying to get it online by the beginning of this summer.

Regards
Chung

 

[downfallofutopia]

dziękuję. I appreciate all the help you guys have been giving me. While I am 8hrs from chicago, I am sure that I can order it over the internet.

Thanks again for your help.