Hey there,
I spent 3 days in Poland last week and that inspired me to start learning Polish. My challenge began on Sunday.
I hope we’ll have some interesting discussions about language learning, the polish language, polish culture and whatnot 
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Cześć Paul. Świetny pomysł, jak będziesz miał wątpliwości to daj znać. A proposito, como te va con tu 90-day -Challenge en idioma espanola?
First experience with Slavic?
Dziękuję
I stopped learning Spanish after a few weeks. I didn’t enjoy studying it for some reason.
Yep…
Slavic languages are kind of scary, but I already noticed that Polish is easier than Japanese and that (most) Poles are more supportive/patient than (most) Parisians^^
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Day 1-4 (1-3 hours a day)
- Found some cool music
I reaaaally like “Happysad” and “Totentanz”. If you guys know any similar bands…
- Created flashcards and watched “Uczmy się polskiego” on youtube
I like the course because it’s 100% in polish. Most courses seem to focus on overexplaining in English…
Whenever there´s text on-screen (“Bo ona jest niesympatyczna !”) I take a screen shot and use it to create a flash card in Anki.
- Worked through some lessons on LingQ (Kim ona jest/Who is she)
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Why that Paule? Curious, because I want to reactivate my Spanish.
Hey! Welcome! Another Polish learner!
I’m 2 months into my 90-day challenge for Polish. I surprised at how good my listening and reading comprehension has become, but my ability to write and speak is just abysmal. I have a grammar book that discusses cases and conjugation, but the language so riddled with inconsistencies and special exceptions that I just don’t think grasping “the rules” is the way to go. I’ve had more success just practicing and practicing and getting “a feel” for what makes sense. Eventually, I suspect some of the logic will start to make sense to me and I can start to make more connections. I’ve already noticed some things confirmed by my grammar books (for example, conjugation is starting to make more sense to me).
So, I need to practice writing more, but it frankly intimidates me, so I spend more of my time reviewing and reading and listening (I need to listen A LOT if I want to complete my 90 day challenge).
I look forward to seeing your progress on the exchange.
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Mostly because it was boring. Vocab and grammar are similar to French (which I already speak) and I’m not that interested in Spanish and South American culture.
I need novelty and variety. That’s probably why I enjoy studying French, Japanese and Polish at the same time^^
That being said, if you hate “starting from scratch” and love hispanic culture, Spanish is probably an awesome language to learn.
Hi Paule! I’m also studying a couple of Slavic languages. I use Russian on here and Slovak on Memrise. You can also try Polish on Memrise. They do have wonderful courses to help to easily remember the learned words.
Viel Erfolge in der Sprache learnen. I think I wrote this correctly, if not I’m sorry.
It’s always those arrogant French (just kidding Frenchies!)
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I’ve been studying Japanese for more than a year and I could only write very, very basic things without using a dictionary to look up the Chinese characters and without making tons of mistakes. Polish might seem really hard to you (because you studied Spanish and Dutch) but some things about Polish are surprisingly easy. I can only compare it to German, French, English and Japanese though)
- The spelling is more phonetic and consistent than English, French and maybe even German. You need to learn 2 new alphabets and more than 2000 chinese characters to learn Japanese…
- Polish doesn’t have articles.
- Polish has only 5 tenses (English has 16, I think)
- When it comes to nasal sounds, Polish seems less tricky than French
- Word order is less important
- Poles don’t expect you to speak their language. During my last vacation, I spoke all day long even though I only studied Polish for a few hours. I said stuff like “Who is direction center?” and “I listen to small coffee” but they still understood what I meant and seemed glad to help me. They probably won’t kill you if you don’t know every exception to every rule…
etc.
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Polish is great, you’re gonna love it. For me it is a big challenge to get a hold of this language (could be because it is my first Slavic language) but when you meet someone for practise they will admire you for the effort and motivate you to go on
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Awesome
I actually found Japanese, during my brief study, to be easier than Polish, but my mother pointed out that I had lived in Okinawa for four years when I was a child and thus had a lot of exposure to it, so the “ground work” was already laid for me to find it “logical.” I have no similar grounding for Polish, so it’s all new.
I found the nasal sounds tricky at first, but now I can pronounce them like a champ (as best as I can tell without any actual Poles giving me an opinion) and I find their alphabet quite easy. The conjugation is, indeed, pretty simple. There’s some complications in there, but I can generally tell at a glance if someone is talking about “I did this” or “You did this” or “He/she/it” did this. There are complications there too, and I’m sure my spelling would be all weird there, if I had to do it without a reference, but just passively I can tell pretty well.
The cases are going to be hard, but I’m told that’s the hardest part for everyone coming at it from a Western European background. But still, how good do I expect to be after 2 months of studying? I figure it’ll take at least a year before I’m competent enough to handle myself. It took several years (of much more relaxed study) to get good at Dutch.
I have really enjoyed exposing myself to Polish culture, though. And I agree with you. No Polish person I’ve ever met seriously expects you to know Polish and are pretty surprised that you’d want to learn it. They seem pretty patient with me so far, and very encouraging.
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This thread is a great example of why I’d love to see an open Polish forum.
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Fortunately I only have to refresh my Spanish but for me it is hard work to do beside Italian. Pronounciation is a horror, in general I mix up everything.
My actual challenge:)
Polski to trudny język ale widzę, że masz już doświadczenie z innymi językami więc na pewno sobie poradzisz. Powodzenia.
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Are you using Memrise, like I told you, Paul? ^^
Memrise is way more intutitive than any other SSR program I’ve tried.