Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]


Not very helpful I'm afraid.

I really must say I pity deaf people in Poland. They can only dream about watching movies.

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]


Good luck indeed. ;)

Language / WHY THE HELL CANT I LEARN POLISH?? [64]

I know exactly how you feel. I hate sitting on the bus hearing some 2-year old coming up with more complex sentences than I ever could've. And they even get the inflections right. It's not fair!! ;)

I don't know how long it would take for an average adult Germanic or Romance language speaker who comes to Poland to start speaking Polish at a decent level, but I would suspect at least 4-5 years or even more. Although I'm sure it's possible to spend a lifetime hear without learning the language properly. Everyone says exposure is the key to learning a language, which is probably true. In the case of Polish it might not even be enough, though.

I fear Polish is the kind of language you simply need to learn as a child, because later it might be too late to "mould" the brain into thinking "po polsku". To use a very poor anology: So far in life a small workshop has been formed in your head with all the equipment, tools etc needed to build rowing boats, and now suddenly you have to start building ocean liners... Needless to say, you need to tear down everything, level a few square kilometres of ground and build a huge shipyard in your brain... ;)

Language / The Polish accusative case [32]

Yes, it's absolutely necessary to learn endings by heart, however, to learn them in the form of a table is rarely advisable as it is too slow.

Language / The Polish accusative case [32]

This site has some pretty nice tables with adjective declensions (also pronouns etc):

polish-translators.net

Memorizing tables is rarely a good idea, but it's a good reference from which you can make your own sentences and learn them by heart. Eventually with enough sentences after lots of practice you will start developing some kind of feeling for the declensions.

Language / Collection of learning resources for learning the Polish language [129]

For learning vocabulary there's a good program called Anki: ichi2.net/anki/

My own Polish-English deck is available for download inside it (Filemenu -> Download -> Shared Deck). As of yet it contains 7200 entries and growing. It contains not only words but also sentences, expressions, phrases and special sentences for practicing cases.

Language / Tego/Jego [15]

In Polish "on" and the equivalent forms in other cases refer to either a living person or an object. It's not like in English where "he" is always a person.

Tego is the neuter/male genitive or male accusative animate version of "ten" which is "this".

"Samochód" is a masculine word, hence the accusative male inanimate version is needed, which is "go/jego".

Language / Collection of learning resources for learning the Polish language [129]

Lately I've been using this dictionary quit a lot: slowniki.gazeta.pl

It has a nice, clean layout, plenty of real-life examples, and it loads faster, is more reliable and less buggy than ling.pl. I also like the fact that it always tells whether a verb is imperfective or perfective, and what the perfective equivalent of an imperfective verb is and vice versa.