Declensions, prepositions and pronouns

Hello all. I'm new here and I've been learning Polish on and off for a while now but I don't enjoy exposure to the language as often as I'd like to. I am also struggling to garner and process any useful information about finer grammatical points. I have some good books aimed specifically at grammar and I feel that my progress with verbs is not quite as dire as my attempts at tackling cases and declensions.

My efforts are varied and relatively frequent but lack any formal structure. Beyond reading my favourite Polish song lyrics on tekstowo.pl et al and listening to antyradio.pl I will occassionally force myself to read newspapers and magazines - but this quickly becomes a dull chore when I find that I understand too little of what I'm reading for the material to hold my attention.

I am posting this in the hope that some helpful PF members will provide links to any good sties they are aware of which help English speakers to master declension properly (with instructions, explanations and examples etc provided in English). I'm also eager to know whether anybody could recommend some good sites for listing all known Polish pronouns and prepositions. Hopefully any feedback from this will enable me to speak Polish more expressively and coherently.

Dzięks,

Miodek

hi dysy
if you do a search you will find lots of what you are looking for, i have posted lots of the same thing.

chaza

Proof that an Englishman can master Polish declension. The guy speaks 20 languages, though...
...

I had a few drinks with this bloke and found him very personable. Very pleasant Byelorussian wife. He also runs a now little-visited forum.

He speaks 20 languages and he is ... British. Very impressive!

What srikes me is that he speaks with a perfect rythm and faultless intonation in Polish, even if he makes a grammatical error here and there. This leads me to the conclusion that it is better to master intonation and rythm of the language than its grammar to make a favorable impression in regard to speaking a foreign language.

The point he's making is that one doesn't have to attend any language school in order to master a foreign language. If people fail to master it, it is because they don't know proper methodology to learn a foreign language efficiently and effectively. What David J. James does is diffusing this methodology free of charge across the internet so that anyone who wants to listen may benefit of it. The guy works as an auditor.

Did anyone look in detail into his methodology? And if so, what are your opinions?

Indeed - Polish seems to be quite nice in the sense that even if you completely mess up the grammar, pronouncing the words correctly leads to people understanding you just fine.

Equally so - you can have perfect grammar, but if you don't pronounce it correctly - they won't understand you at all.

(at least so far in my experience, people tend to perceive you as an idiot, but understandable if you have decent pronouncation but poor grammar)

Do you have link to his videos on YouTube?

He is so fluent..! Impressive.

youtube.com/user/usenetposts

Hi Dysydent miodek. You may have seen my posts relating to Polish grammar. There are a couple of good sites which give a brief overview of grammar:

polishlanguage.org.uk/polish-cases-adjectives/
polishlanguage.org.uk/polish-cases-nouns/

I'm also using a great book 'Hurra!!! Po Polsku 1'. This introduces the cases one by one, and it's been a godsend to me.

Give them a try!

Polish grammar is impossible to learn.

Yep it is, but with perseverance you'll crack it. Slowly slowly!

How far have you got with Polish?

As previously posted; the deeper the mine, the richer the ore! The Polish mine is well worth the dig, you can trust us on that one!

Hey

The hardest thing to learn for English speakers are Polish Noun Declensions. I am a Canadian but my parents are Polish. Everytime I bring up this subject to them they say " it just is, or memorize that" but just recently I found something that help me understand better. First try to understand English in a Polish sense.

example: In the sentence, "I sent the letter to my friend's house, in an envelope, Mom," for example, "I" is the equivalent of the nominative, "letter" is the accusative, "friend" is the genitive, "house" is the dative, "envelope" is locative, and "Mom" is the vocative.

Also see Wiki books polish declension cant send site because the site wont let me cheers

Counting isn't that far behind in difficulty eitherLOL

Bohunek, if you've ever studied any German, you'd recognize certain familar cases in Polish. If Polish is your very FIRST foreign language as a monolingual Anglophone, it can be quite a bumpy ride for a while! Like the proverbial rollercoaster however, you might think you're going to "fall off" and get injured. You won't, just so long as you stick with it and especially take all your cues from a qualfied native ONLY:-))