Language / Where did you start or the best techniques for learning Polish. [85]

The audio-visual method still seems to most organic, that is, effective! I learned most of the Polish I know merely through watching mainstream Polish movies with POLISH (rather than English or German) subtitles which I could switch on or off whenever I wished:-)

TV news on POLSAT also worked for me using the identical technique.

Language / Polish pronounciation of: cz vs ć/ci, sz vs ś/si, ź vs ż and dż vs dź/dzi - how to make these sound diff [79]

Though in "marznąć" there's neither a "ź" nor a "ż"-sound either:-) The "r" however is elided in words such as "gorzy", "górze" etc.

Language / Polish pronounciation of: cz vs ć/ci, sz vs ś/si, ź vs ż and dż vs dź/dzi - how to make these sound diff [79]

"Leisure" pronounced correctly "leZHur" may come close to a cross between "Ź" and "Ż" in (American) standard English, at any rate:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

The reason the Left has been in decline is that it hasn't paid attention to trends over the last fourty years or so. As society becomes more and more greedy, selfish, piggish, and distant from the original teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition (before being corrupted beyond repair by Calvinism aka the Protestant Ethic, aka PURITANISM!!!), the more right leaning aka Republican in the post-Lincoln American sense it will continue to become:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

I agree!

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

She's simply way too mired in political leftist chic for her own good, that's the bottom line here and folks are gettin' mighty tired!

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

True. However, it's nonetheless a different story here in the US! While the average auto worker in Germany nowadays, even in the nearly defunct once thriving coal mining sector, the service sector in megalopolae such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg will be foreign born, said is NOT the case in areas of America, to repeat, such as local coal mining, cable repair etc. in rural areas of the country, where the workforce is nearly 100% white.

The big Northern and West Coast centers being the exception, not the rule:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

TheOther, unfortunately, that "myth" is based to a large extent on fact! Here in the US, you won't find a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male working in most labor-intensive or D.D.D. (Difficult, Dangerous, Dirty) jobs, save for in the mining industry of places in the South aka West Va.

:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

I do agree with you about the regrettable outcome of multiculturalism as resulting in the import of cheap labor to Germany.
Look what damage it's already done to the US!!

Cheap is dear, always remember that:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

She's still undecided about Turkey joining the EU, by the way:-) For me, the choice is clear; a vote FOR Turkey's entering is a vote AGAINST the future of the EU, period!!!

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

You, of course, can I hope retrace the thinking of such seemingly over-the-top leftism as the direct result of Germany's recent past!!

Your own background is none of my beeswax, but I can't imagine any intelligent, educated, post-War gentile German reacting to the idea of "The boat is full up, mates!!" in the same way as an average, intelligent, educated post-War W.A.S.P. American, Maf, because Merkel, Schultz, the whole Cap Gang has had to reckon with the most distasteful notion ever since they were knee high to a grasshopper, that THEIR country nearly wiped out an entire group of people, let along millions of non-German Slavs, even Balts, together with gays, the terminally ill etc..

This has conditioned German thinking in large measure, certainly since the advent of the '60's, when the children of the perpetrators finally decided to hash stuff out with their folks about what REALLY went on in Germany from 1933-1945!!!

You might not like it, but that's the way it is, knee-jerk reactions notwithstanding:-)

Language / How many words does the Polish language have? [30]

Perhaps though, substitute "word" (słowa) with "concept" (pojęcie) and it will become clear that utterances aka words may be divided into single units of meaning, i.e. lexemes, such as in English "big", "ground", "earth", "limit" and any number of seemingly "unrelated" ideas (itself almost a misnomer, e.g. "earth" and "ground" may in fact be the SAME word, figuratively or absolutely in certain languages), or, compounds such as my examples before "newsstand", "highway" and so forth:-)

Again, my point about Polish is that verbs as one instance, can most often be prefixed interminably, for example "pisać", "POpisać", "PODpisać", then "pisYWać", with "ROZpisywać" etc...., so that the total number of sheer expressions with this one simple, everyday word can be dizzying!

Language / How many words does the Polish language have? [30]

Merely to weigh back into this discussion thread after a brief hiatus, word count is interesting to me as a translator!

In English, individual words, compound or otherwise, are counted as full words (excepting of course, sighs, expletives and the like). For instance, "newsstand", "highway" etc. are clearly single words, although originally composed of two words later contracted.

German compounding creates so many possible neulogisms, then there is the issue of to count vs. not to count prefixed endings of separable verbs etc., word count can be exceedingly challenging aka the question "How many words does German have?"

Polish too raises the question of when is a prefixed verb counted as a separate word, since prefixes are so productive, that it's all but impossible to calculate exactly how many "words" the Polish language actually has:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

If you're saying she's got to become more hands-on-practical about things, not merely academically pragmatic, I agree with you completely on that score!

Only don't let's write our post mortums to liberalism too soon. Merely thinking about the converse fills most thinking people of any political stripe with horror:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

My reaction, Maf, was to your comments, not to you personally:-)

Merkel is clearly stretching tolerance to its very limits, and whilst I may disagree with her handling of the entire migrant affair, one certainly can't fault her for having her heart in the right place!

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

Maf, since when, pray, is humanism, what defines us all as human and not four-legged animals, outdated??? If that's your attitude, why bother electing any official, let's further descend into sandbox fighting like the children we (ONCE!!) were and barbarism a la Trump, or instead, advance into a more enlightened thinking!!

I suggest you and Johnny and a few others here seriously re-consider your point of view. You seem not to understand cause and effect.
In addition, if the Judeo-Christian ethic is finished, what's the point in even living?
:-)

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

Whoops, I meant "The Bohemian Corporal". The Little Corporal was NapoleonLOL

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

I repeat, as to my friend Johnny Rebel Without a Clue, The Little Corporal some eighty-years ago, also exhorted HIS people to follow him into a thousand-year Reich of German strength, the long-awaited triumph of the Master Race, to leave the "dead" past of the "Jewish enlightenment" behind and to accept the notion of racial superority a la Nietzsche (whom he misread!!!!) or Darwin (whom he couldn't for the life of him understandLOL), abandon childish notions of human equality and finally allow only the strong, white, and fit to survive.

And look where that wonderful philosophy got us:-)

Embrace change, but change to WHAT???! YOU seem to have little to lose but your humanity!

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

Perhaps, Maf, as here at home, the key question we all have to ask ourselves, is "How did we get to this point?"!!
It's easy to hit someone when they're down, to attack the policy without examining the cause, but perhaps the problem today is precisely that liberal causes seem at an all time low and that we've giving in more and more to hypocrisy, infantile instant gratification, and the not so slow demise of tolerance.

Tough times don't last, but tough people do. It's a clichee, but it has an element of truth. It is when the going gets most difficult that core democratic values are most sorely needed. In the '30's, when Hitler was conquering Europe and it looked as though the sun had set on democracy and enlightenment, the US NEVER gave in to the Huey Longs, the Rankins, the Bilbos or the Gerald L.K Smiths of this country!!

Roosevelt surely made mistakes along the way, serious, indeed fatal errors in judgement aka sending back the SS-Missouri to Germany and delivering the Jews into the hands of the enemy. Yet the country didn't turn her back shamelessly on the values of justice and fairness upon which we were founded (although sadly, not often practiced).

I believe that we need more idealists such as Ms. Merkel, tempered though with a pragmatism which doesn't yield to intolerance.

News / Frau Merkel today in Poland [70]

Chancellor Merkel's really between a rock and a hard place! On the one hand, she's chief engineer of the Europe's economic motor, in itself an awesome responsibility, added to that, the weight of her country's history whenever she all but sets foot out of Germany. Furthermore, she's got to please all factions within her already splintered government in order to accommodate their wishes (meaning, to get re-elected), moreover, she now has to deal with the UK, whose PM is quite similar to her in a number of ways, yet she's also got to deal with "Donald The Menace" over across the pond.

All things considered, she's been doing her level best to remain a bulwark of sanity and democracy on a continent which is falling apart as we speak, and in a country which is threatening to turn back the hands of time to 1933!!!

Failed as her methods have been, she continues to need our support in order to learn from these failures, but quickly:-)

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

Mimicking the speech patterns of native speakers is especially important. In addition, watching for the typical transference errors in English is often a reasonably safe clue as to how that person structures thought in their mother tongue:-)

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

Not a bad idea!

When I was learning Polish, my wife thought I was nuts at first, labeling all the objects in our apartment "LAMPA", "ŚCIANA", "FOTEL", "SZAFA" etc. on index cards, but in the end, she grew to see the wisdom in my method (scarcely original, I can assure you!). Polish colleagues would correct me when we were conversing, eventually, I learned to correct myself and usually got it right...the second or third timeLOL

I reiterate, all the stuff I've posted applies to me alone, the way I learn a foreign language. This isn't meant as gospel for everyone:-)

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

I can relate to what you're saying, Ziemowit!

Many of my Polish students of English (in New York) would usually AVOID speaking, either on the phone or in person as well, with native New Yorkers with English as a mother tongue. Instead, they'd prefer chatting with French, Germans, native Hispanics, Japanese, anybody but an Anglophone:-)

Conversely, when I speak to Poles, either in a consulary function or even Greenpoint store owners etc., I only speak in Polish, not so much as practice for me, but because most honestly, bless their hearts, don't understand me if I speak to them in English!

Nowadays however, with caller I.D. and speaker phone, whenever my acquaintance or her husband calls for me on my landline, I can gently put them on speaker phone, remove the receiver from my ear for a moment, and fetch a dictionary if/when I really need it.

And it works!

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

Phone calls are always stressful for foreign language learners! I can still recall the first time I called an acquaintance of mine outside of Wrocław:-)

All the tapes, CDs, pattern drills etc. cannot truly prepare the novice for who will answer the phone on the other side! In normal speech, the other person typically doesn't concede to the perceived mistakes of the person calling.

In my case, my friend's parents (older people, hovering round about 60 or so and spoke zero English) were home and her father picked up with such a regional accent, I could barely understand him after a cursory "Dzień dobry!"!

Later learned he was a retired iron foundry worker who was barely literate in PolishLOL

As I gained more practice through persistence, it became as easy to speak on the phone as it would have been in German.

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

I agree to some extent, Chemikiem. Only, it's hard to put a time limit and learning or progress!

This remains the core problem with most foreign-language classes; the instructor sets unrealistic learning goals and all too often merely turns pages week by week, i.e. "Old business, that was last class, new business, we're on the simple past today.." etc. which is simply mind-numbing, not to mention, just plain ineffective:-)

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

I prefer Wajda and Andrzejewski, however, they constitute "classic" Polish cinema, therefore not so useful in today's language with their outdated slang:-)

Older films can of course be enjoyable due to the aesthetic of a now arcane style of speech!

This poster used to listen to POLSAT daily when I still had cable. I'd watch the news in Polish without subtitles either, but now I could only watch it on a PC.

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

Absolutely. The arsenal of grammar required to carry on an even half-way literate conversation in English pales in comparison before Polish:-)

At a certain point as well, try watching more or less recent Polish films with POLISH subtitles, rather than English or even zero captions!
By seeing what the speakers/actors are saying will increase your understanding of structure along with vocab. This will also reduce the annoying and sometimes detrimental need to translate everything being said. Watching with target language closed captions helps to eliminate source language intereference.

A relatively recent (if heavy) Polish movie I saw on netflicks is "Kret" (The Mole) about the deep rancor left behind in contemporary Poland by the aftershocks of Solidarność during the '80s. I watched with Polish subtitles on a friend's PC, then switched them off and was able to watch the rest of the film. Occasionally, I even jotted down some key words which kept cropping up aka "zdrajca" (traitor), used often throughout the early part of the movie.

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

@Chemnikiem, I'm scarcely being negative, merely realistic in as far as fluency in Polish is certainly possible, only not the way Jiu Jitsu means or believes it can be achieved:-)

I'm not knocking language learning software programs per se, merely advising caution as to one's expectations.
Recently checked out Rosetta Stone's Intermediate Polish program, and to be brutally honest, had I wished to improve a language I was just learning (in this case Polish), I'd have been stumped at to what the speakers were saying to each other! Luckily, I caught most everything without closed captions or translation of the CD dialogues, but I do recall that the examples given were not transparent.

Then tried beginning Greek, a language which I don't know AT ALL, and Rosetta kept me guessing so much I finally gave up:-)

But again, it all depends purely on one's study goals! If basic CONVERSATIONAL "fluency" in daily life situations is the only thing required, the Rosetta might well be fine. Grammatical depth and understanding of case endings, counting quirks, aspectual usage and the like, I'd be damned if any run-of-the-mill CD-Rom course can be effective.

Speaking here solely from my experience and so don't wish to rain on Jiu Jitsu's parade!

Language / How long to to learn Polish? In hours? [64]

In learning ANY foreign/second language, time is the last thing to worry about, if the goal is a serious acquisition of that language!
If the goal is to take some free crash course in order to visit a country over a prescribed period of time and then return home, there are a bazillion so-called "classes" you can take.

Polish is a language, as I've said here many times, which requires truly monastic focus, concentration, and above all, patience, in order to master properly:-)

Even with Rosetta, Berlitz, Pimsleur, to be frank, you're probably wasting your time!

Law / The official Web pages are confusing in telling me exactly how many years I need to obtain Polish citizenship. [16]

Why should he? It's hardly his fault that Romania's been made a punching bag by the Allies ever since the end of WWII!

Maybe it's YOU who should "get a grip", rozumiemnic.
:-)