Language / How hard is it to learn Polish? [178]

Well done you then, glad you enjoyed learning Polish. Why dont we switch to Pl then? :P

as for the knowledge of other languages you like to brag about - bear in mind there's a difference between understanding a language like every 5th word being said in a conversation (passive knowledge) and the actual ability to speak it for real (active knowledge) that is being able to speak, understand, listen and write as well as form correct sentences using grammatical rules at a natural flowing speed. Are you able to do it, not in Pl, but in other slavic languages?

I'm a Slavic native speaker. I know my language and its linguistic nature. I'm a linguist too, specialised in the English morphology and I've learnt English and I can assure you it was easier for me to learn English than for you to learn Polish, which confirms what I've said earlier in my 1st post ;) Switching between the case systems in languages can be problematic.

Aren't we Poles lucky?, got the complex declension system! yay!:P

Language / How hard is it to learn Polish? [178]

I think you're not quite getting what I wrote and there's no need for you to be arrogant and patronising. I didnt limit my statement only to the case system differences. I also mentioned the complex phonological and morphological system of Polish as compared to English (and other Germanic languages with a reduced case system).

In my text I implied that Polish is easier to learn by for eg. the Russians than by the English because they are indeed similar languages (but not entirely though)- they may be in the same language family but not on the same sub-branch) However a Russian needs to learn Polish and a Pole needs to learn Russian to be able to speak fluently and I do mean 'LEARN'.

According to what you said, I assume you know Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian as well as Czech and other Slavic languages just... because they are in the same language family and some words are the same. That's ridiculous, mate. And I bet you wouldn;t be able to make out most of the Russian speech if it comes down to the real communication Not to mention the grammatical rules and correct sentence formation.

Polish is difficult but it's learnable. Still easier to learn by the Eastern Europeans than by the Westerners due to the shared linguistic complexity in many linguistic aspects not just because it's in a the same family of IE languages as Russian and the like.

Language / How hard is it to learn Polish? [178]

Polish seems to be harder to learn for people, whose languages are less inflective then Polish (or any other highly inflected Eastern European language) eg. British people find it more difficult to learn Polish rather than Russians. It's easier to switch from a language of complex case system to one that has got them reduced rather than the other way round. English has got a couple of cases in its grammar while Polish operates on 7 case system. Add to that conjugations, exceptions to declensions and internal vowel mutations plus the well-built morphological and phonological system of the Polish language and you end up with "a monster" language that scares away the non-Poles.

I very often have British people complaining of Polish words looking too long and too scary. They struggle to pronounce most of the consonantal clusters in Polish words. They don't even wanna think of learning the grammar!

However hard work always pays off and if you try REALLY hard, you will learn Polish at some point.