Language / Spend more time on Polish verbs or nouns? [8]


Both verbs and nouns are of course essential to understanding and communicating in a language, so I would recommend that you focus on all words that are frequently encountered regardless of what part of speech they belong to.

Of course there are a number of common verbs that are used in all sorts of situations, and these basic verbs are probably more important than just any noun. Nouns are more connected to specific situations, so which nouns you need is probably more connected to your particular goal of learning.

In general, of course, more nouns than verbs are needed to communicate well in any language. I'm saving most "new words" I encounter in Polish in my vocabulary training software, and with 9783 entries so far they are distributed as follows:

Nouns: 4929
Verbs: 1759 (counted as aspect pairs. E.g. robic/zrobić is counted as one verb).
Adjectives: 1481

The rest of the entries are for the remaining parts of speech, phrases, sentences and expressions.

Language / Locative case and prepositions in Polish [13]

Check this thread for more details:

Locative case declensions

Language / Which is harder: Pole learning Russian or Russian learning Polish language? [57]

Actually Danish is spoken by more people than Norwegian (although the difference is quite small). I think Norway vs. Sweden would be a better analogy. Norwegians generally understand Swedish better than Swedes understand Norwegian. Mostly because Norwegian media is very much more centred on Sweden than Swedish media is centred on Norway. I guess also geography is a contributing factor. Sweden is pretty much the only neighbour of Norway (I'm not counting Finland and Russia here), and Norway being such a narrow country (in shape) the Swedish border is usually not too far away. For Sweden, Norway is just one of three "neighbours". Swedes aren't really exposed much to the Norwegian language or Norwegian culture (with a few exceptions).

As for the original thread question, I would hypothesize that it's slightly harder for a Russian to learn Polish than vice versa on account of Polish grammar being more complex, and for pronunciation reasons. For example, as a Russian learning Polish you have to get used to learn 13 different simple past forms instead of 4, and you have two plural forms instead of one, etc. From experience, though, I know that Russian speakers often learn Polish very quicky once they live here in Poland, even without studying it.