What do you find difficult about learning Polish?

Danielle, is English or Polish your mother tongue?

i meant for pronouncing words.

You really think English is easier for a Pole to pronounce than vice versa? Jury's still out on that one!

Consider first the following: silent or reduced letters in English -

DIME ('e' written but not spoken)
THOROUGHLY ('o' 'u' 'g' and 'h' muted or silent)
NIGHT (long/closed 'i'-sound, yet no final 'e' as in 'dime' and 'time' etc.)
ESPECIALLY (unclear accent/syllable stress, 'sh'-sound for 'c')

and the list goes on and on and on and on..........

Compare Polish -

WIE (once learned that 'w' is like English 'v', VEE' YEH)
GDZIE (pronounced EXACTLY as written!)
POKÓJ (zero irregularities in either spelling or pronounciation)
SUFIT (see it, say it with a regular first syllable beat ALWAYS!!)
KSIĄŻKA ('ą' always same, final 'a', always 'ah cf. English 'a'!!!)

This lawyer rests his case!

POLISH IS HARD!

It's in the top 10 if not top 5 most difficult languages in the world.

English starts easy and gets harder and from what I've heard Polish starts hard and gets easier.

Anyone on this site who has read half of my stuff knows I really struggle with Polish but I'm sticking to it is because I know no pain no gain!

I'm retaking my English GCSE for the sake of learning! How is that for dedication!

:P

Znam język polski bardzo dobrze teraz !!!!!!

Top List of the hardest languages to learn
Oct 24th, 2008 | By Jonas | Category: English

1. Basque
2. Hungarian
3. Chinese
4. Polish
5. Japanese
6. Russian
7. German
8. Korean
9. English
10. Swahili

he he he, not so much

Teraz znam język polski bardzo dobrze

but keep trying!
I agree about Hungarian; I have tried years ago to learn and it was really hard.

Who wrote that list?

I think both finnish and wolof must be more difficult to learn than hungarian, at least wolof, finnish probably shares position with hungarian.

Polish words are much easier to spell than english words, because you just decombine the pronunciation. Only sz, cz, rz, ch are different. Learn how each letter is pronunced and you will be able to spell words.

For me, it's all about finding the time. I know that the best approach is to do a little bit every day, but I always end up doing my homework on the tube on the way in to class :(

I am very fortunate that I work in a very Polish environment, so I come into contyact with the language every day, but I still need to get used to the grammar rules and build up my vocab.

The fact that I cant see how it will benefit me in any other country.

Well, it could help you in the Balkans perhaps. Some Poles have spoken Polish there and been understood. I plan to speak Polish there in every country bar Albania in my forthcoming 10-day trip.

It also goes a long way In Czech and Slovakia, but those countries are not on my list. slovakia was even worse than Poland. what a rude bunch of so and so's.

Yeah, it works there to a certain extent. When I went through the border area with the Slovaks, they were gawping at me quite the thing like I was an African-American. I don't know many Slovaks overall tho. Wahldo is of Slovakian descent I think.

ditto!

English starts (looking) super easy, then gets SUPER hard, if one wants to really master it on anything other than on a mere tourist level, that is.--:) LOL

Polish, as with most other languages on that list, starts out looking impossibly hard, but actually gets much easier with practice, as verbs classes, though numerous, follow regular patterns (even the irregularities become predictable) and pronounciation, once one gets past the consonant clusters, is a breeze compared with, say, French or English especially!

I found this blog really interesting, it states that Polish is the hardest language to learn=/

poland-claritaslux/blog/the-hardest-language-to-learn

Polish is not as difficult as some languages. There are plenty of books, websites and nice people around to help. This is not the case with many, more obscure languages. Why should Polish be on someone's list of most difficult languages and not Slovakian which is close to Polish, or Kashubian which is also close to Polish yet lacking in resources for learners? What about languages like Nenec, Nahautl or Fang?

Yo, guys! The toughest nut to crack on record remains Navajo, as I had posted here on PF many moons ago-:) Just check out a quick Wiki summary and you'll be saying, you foreign learners, "Gee, Polish's not THAT bad!" LOL

This list makes no mention of Finnish or Irish, both of which are tougher than German. I expect that Breton and Welsh are also no cake ride.

Then Sami is a lot of fun too...

When it comes to how hard a language is to learn one must also consider: what is the learner's native language?

Good point, Gordy. If your native language is English, then Polish will put you through your paces! As was said however, if Nahuatl, Fijian etc. is the learner's mother tongue, Polish might then well be a piece of cake (..or pineapple, respectively LOL) -:).

and what languages the one has learnt before. with my native polish and basic russian i can understand most of ukrainian. as a slav i undestand a bit from every slavic language and with my knowledge of crillic i can read some words in greek.

learning polish is very harddd

You should try English before you attempt Polish!

Actually (as a Pole learning English) these are not the English pronunciation difficulties I would find the biggest problem. For me it's not about the letters that aren't pronounced (if you're tought a pronunciation along with a spelling it's not that frustrating) it's mostly about the vowels. English has them short and long, which is hard to get a hold of as we only have one variety. Most Poles would probably pronounce 'ship' and 'sheep' similarly, as well as 'beach' and 'bitch' (you can see the problem there, RIGHT?)

And lets not forget the 'th' sound (like in 'there' or 'think') or the strange nasal sound at the end of 'thing' or generaly in the '-ing' ending. A NIGHTMARE!

However, even though I will probably never fully master the English language (should I even use 'the' there? - yep, one of the nightmares), I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to learn Polish as a foreign language. All the prefixes and suffixes and cases and declinations. Commonly, I don't even realize they exist (I know they do, of course!), I just use them, but if I were to think about them, about which one to use - that would probably be frustrating ;-)

Alcestis, you make a sound and articulate case for the English vs. Polish language(s). I wonder though how typical you are for the rest of both your age bracket as well as you fellow Poles.

My experience has been that often times, foreign learners become, how shall I put it gently, "far too cocky, far too soon" and frequently assume the relative ease with which Basic English flows, that this is the WHOLE of English, which it clearly isn't, even if the general world standard has been whittled down a tidy bit-:)

Several of my examples were in fact words with both silent letters, as well as the 'th'-sound. For non-Poles, a word like "POTRZEBOWAĆ" or, even for Poles I'm told, words with 'u' vs. 'ó', e.g. "Jurek" (and not "JÓrek" etc..) vs. "ogórek" (rather than "ogUrek"...)

can present both orthographical, not to mention phonetic, challenges. LOL

As a non-Pole, doing dictations for me at the start was torture: I couldn't see a difference between the word 'ugór' or' ógur', or 'ógór' etc....

I finally learned on the umpteenth bloody page of corrections, that it's 'ugór'.

I didn't say I find English easy, I merely suggested it was easier than Polish, mostly, for it's lack of cases, etc.

And no, I don't know how typical I am "for the rest of both my age bracket as well as my fellow Poles," but I surely have bigger problems with pronunciation than most of my friends and... I suppose that my sentence building skills could use some work out as well.


Don't worry many Poles have the very same problem with dictations. Especially that it's all about spelling rules, nothing more. As far as pronunciation is concerned there is no difference what so ever between 'ó' and 'u' or 'ż' and 'rz', etc. We spend our early years of shool education learning those rules.

BTW, I have a question, out of a pure curiousity - why do people learn Polish as a foreign language? Is it for work, beacause you want to visit Polend or do you simply like to learn languages and Polish seemed to be interesting enough?

BTW, why would they teach you the word 'ugór'? It's not on the "list" of words that are actually used. EVER.

Perfective and imperfective verbs are the latest thing I'm having difficulty with.


Just for fun really. I have a need to natter. When the people around me were all nattering in Polish, I was left with little choice. I had always wanted to learn another language, and there's something off-putting about languages like French and German.

Ugór is used some times. It means "abandoned field"

Handy spelling tip. AFAIK only one word begins with ó, namely ów, an old fashioned word meaning 'this' (masc sing)).

That narrows it down to ugór and ugur. Hearing the word in isolation wouldn't help, but if you know any other case form it should be obvious; if the u sound ever changes to o you know it's ó (always related to o, either morphologically or etymologically).

Hearing the word for the first time I'd probably guess ugór (just because I think that -ur is less common in Polish than -ór)