Learning Grammarnese

Open Forum
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So, today I was like “I should learn some stuff about Polish grammar. This will help me notice patterns when I’m reading and listening”. I looked up “Polish grammar for beginners” and found “Polish grammar in a nutshell”. Then I started skimming and…jesus…christ…

“Polish has a well developed system of verbal adjectives (participles),verbal adverbs (gerunds), and verbal nouns, in both Perfective and Imperfective aspects.”

This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ll focus on reading/listening anyway (because it works^^) but I still think that learning…well…how to read a textbook…might be useful.

Do you know any ressources that explain grammar terminology without assuming that you already know grammar terminology? Should I just read/listen to grammar lessons and look up unknown words? Any ideas?

PS:I want to learn grammar terminology because I want to be able to read texts that are written in “Grammarnese” and the ressources that you suggest don’t have to be about Polish. They can be about English, German, French, Polish or Japanese and in English, German or French.

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What helps me in these cases are books or websites that explain the grammar issues with lots of examples. I have a wonderful grammar book for English that works this way. The explanation gives you a general idea and the examples show how it works. That is what I miss in really short grammar books. But the short books may help you if you’ve ‘learned’ the grammar and want to look up things.

Unfortunately I cannot help you with Polish.

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I speak Polish but I cannot imagine what all those clever words mean ^^

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Everytime I read grammar rules I feel like I die a little bit inside.

ON: Maybe just google for some grammar lessons on google and import them into LingQ?

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I forgot to clarify what I’m looking for, sorry^^

I want to learn grammar terminology because I want to be able to read things that are written in “Grammarnese” and the ressources that you suggest don’t have to be about Polish. They can be about English, German, French, Polish or Japanese and in English, German or French.

I’ll check out your lessons about German grammar. ^^

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I get the impression that German and Polish grammar have much more in common than…say…English and Polish. I guess Polish is pretty intuitive for someone who already speaks Russian.

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I guess Polish has a couple of words that stem from German, but otherwise I don’t really think they are related in any way nor that being a Polish native speaker helps me to a significant extent with my process of learning German. Honestly I can put a finger on maybe half of the grammar aspects that you quoted before, though I don’t think it is that important to understand grammar/language structure at the very beginning. If I were you, I would just continue reading/listening and I believe that at a certain point in the future you will just get the understaning of certain patterns and might find it easier to look into more sophisticated grammar at that point in the future.

Anyway, good luck with your Polish. I hope you will enjoy it and the whole learing experience will prove rewarding to you!

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Wikipedia usually does a good job of presenting concepts and breaking down academic gibberish. Sometimes you have to surf the cross-references and links a bit, until you get to comprehensible language, but mostly it works for me.

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“Everytime I read grammar rules I feel like I die a little bit inside.”

I know what it’s like^^

“Maybe just google for some grammar lessons on google and import them into LingQ?”

The problem is that you can’t really “translate” concepts that you don’t understand. I might be able to come up with short definitions "comparative - - YouTube "

BUT: in order to find a short definition, I need a good ressource (one that doesn’t assume that I have a masters in linguistics…)

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Meinst Du eine Erklärung der Begriffe?

http://www.vhs-lennetal.de/kurse/webbasys/downloads/Grammatikbegriffe.pdf

Oder habe ich Deine Frage falsch verstanden?

j:-)

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"I guess Polish has a couple of words that stem from German, but otherwise I don’t really think they are related in any way nor that being a Polish native speaker helps me to a significant extent with my process of learning German. "

They don’t have to be related to have things in common though. I was thinking of stuff like…

  1. Gender
    For example, english adjectives don’t change depending on the gender of the noun. They do in German and Polish…

good night / dobrA noc / gutE Nacht
good evening/ dobrY wieczór / gutEN Abend

In English, humans are divided into male and female, almost everything else is neuter. In German and Polish, inanimate objects can be male or female.

  1. tenses

German doesn’t really distinguish between “I talk” and “I’m talking”. Polish doesn’t seem to do that either.

  1. verbs

I’ve heard native speakers of English say that “perfective and imperfective verb-aspects” (like “zjeść” and “jeść”) make learnign Polish super-difficult. I just think of them as “aufessen” and “essen”.

  1. cases

We have 4 cases in common. Instrumental, Locative and Vocative make sense to me. I think they’d be less intuitive if my L1 was English. They’d probably make even more sense if my L1 was a slavic language, but stilll…

I could list even more similarities (and I’m still a beginner) but I think you get what I mean.

" If I were you, I would just continue reading/listening"

I’ve been doing that for years (with English, French and Japanese) and I’ll do the same thing with Polish. Reading about grammar helps me notice patterns though. It’d be even more helpful if I knew more “Grammarnese”. I also wanna be able to respond to Grammarians in a language that they understand :wink:

“Anyway, good luck with your Polish. I hope you will enjoy it and the whole learing experience will prove rewarding to you!”

Thank you. Viel Erfolg with your German. Maybe we can talk in German/Polish some day :slight_smile:

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“Oder habe ich Deine Frage falsch verstanden?”

Nö^^

"Meinst Du eine Erklärung der Begriffe?

http://www.vhs-lennetal.de/kurse/webbasys/downl…
http://www.deutschalsfremdsprache.ch/contentLD/…"

Ich komme mir zwar’n bisschen blöd vor, wenn ich Sachen von “www.deutschalsfremdsprache.ch” lese, aber…öhm…ich muss zugeben, dass das mir geholfen hat xD

Danköööö

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Hi, Paul! =)))

I do have, though! =))) And not just a Master of linguistics! :wink: So, as you probably noticed, for me the grammar phenomena explanation is just an ordinary and usual language! =)))

Besides, you were absolutely right to assume Russian and Polish grammar are similar to the extent of the intuitive language acquisition possibility; this is exactly the reason why I understand Polish so easily! :wink:

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j :wink:

Gerne geschehen!

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Helo Pauler:) I’m wondering what is your opinion about conection of Russian , Polish and Latin?
I’m sure that you as an experienced linguist do have some clear statement about. I’m a begginer in, but since I do understand Latin grammar rules, I’ve been seeing a lot of similarities:)

Thank you in advance:)

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Yeah, this stuff makes no sense until you study the language as you would a dead language. After two semesters of university latin I can now understand quite a lot of grammarnese… although not so much latin.

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Hi ! =)))

Oh, really, it’s such a huge topic for discussion, that seems like we both will be killed by this topic starter for a huge lot of words to be written as for this statement under discussion! :wink:

I’ll just provide several aspects in which the grammar systems of the three languages divereged and in which they still retain convergency, though! :wink:

Latin and Polish have Vocative Case, but modern Russian completely lost it.

The verb ‘to be’ in the Present tense has been retained in both Latin and Polish but it’s nearly completely lost in Russian, with some fairly rare cases remaining still; in these cases Russian begins to sound very eloquent and exquisite, even to a degree of an unnecessarily high-flown style! :wink:

However, the Instrumental case, both in Polish and in Russian has been really very stable and its origin is in Ablativus Instrumenti in Latin! =)))

Besides, the system of declentions and conjgations both in Russian and in Polish has its origin in Latin, which had as many as 5 different patterns (or paradigms as the linguists call them) for verb conjugations and noun and adjective declentions! :wink:

Needless to say, there is a huge lot of words borrowed from Latin in both Russian and Polish! =))

There’s huge number of other aspects, but I need to be asked more specifically in order to elaborate on them! :wink:

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Well, there are obviously some similarities, which is nice. What I was saying is that I don’t believe that being a Polish native speaker gives me any sort of significant edge in learning German, but… what am I saying! You seem so excited and enthusiastic about your new challange with Polish and I write stuff that can be potentially discouraging! Just disregard my comments and keep going the way you are and I am sure you will get a good command of Polish very quickly.

I am obviously open to any sort of German/Polish language exchange. If you come up with any difficulties learining Polish don’t hesitate to ask me!

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Gratias ago! Responsum tui pulcherima est, gratium habeo:). Lingua Latina numquam mortua erit sed partibus aliis linguis adhuc est.

Eduard:)

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Gratias ago quoque, quod responsum vestrum in vera Lingua Latina est! =))

Paul :wink:

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