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Is Polish really that hard?

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125 messages over 16 pages: 1 2 3 4 57 ... 6 ... 15 16 Next >>
B-Tina
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Germany
dragonsallaroun
Joined 5529 days ago

123 posts - 218 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Polish

 
 Message 41 of 125
17 October 2010 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
I largely agree with Lucas, just one small note:

Lucas wrote:

- spelling is not tricky at all (there is always one only way to spell each of those
phonemes)


This holds true for a vast amount of phonemes - however, there is an exception to the rule: ż/rz and u/ó are pronounced the same way (quite a lot of Poles seems to have trouble with spelling at this point as well, though).

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John Smith
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Australia
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Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish
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 Message 42 of 125
20 October 2010 at 4:27pm | IP Logged 
I don't think it's harder than Czech. Probably the same? Just wondering. I'm interested in learning some Polish.
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clumsy
Octoglot
Senior Member
Poland
lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish
Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi

 
 Message 43 of 125
22 October 2010 at 2:14pm | IP Logged 
It's Polish grammar which is hard, there are some many rules, and exceptions from them.
One Polish language learner said once thing like
it's not that Polish has a lot of irregular verb, it just has few regular ones.


I mean, cases verbs.

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Felipe Monteiro
Triglot
Newbie
Brazil
Joined 5549 days ago

4 posts - 4 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*, German, English
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 44 of 125
04 December 2010 at 4:07pm | IP Logged 
Lucas wrote:
I don't know polish (I spoke slovak when I've been there), but I know this:

- there is a myth of the polish difficulty: I guess most polish has been raised in the
idea that their language is particularly complicated


I think this is a very common idea. People in Brazil also think that portuguese is an extremely hard language, but now I think that it is very easy for forners to learn portuguese.

Quote:
- phonology is a little harder as other slavic languages (more different phonemes)
- spelling is not tricky at all (there is always one only way to spell each of those
phonemes)
- the stress is regular

In russian you have two difficulties there is not in polish: spelling a stress. So I
hardly believe than russian is easier than polish...


Actually polish phonology is very easy for me, because it matches very well portuguese sounds. Spelling isn't that tricky, but it is tricky enough that I make errors in nearly everything I write. German was a lot easier when it comes to spelling.

On the other hand I have to say that polish grammer has been brutally hard for me. Declension changes sometimes if something is animate or not, there are effectively 2 plurals (2,3,4,22,23,24,32,33,34,etc are declinated differently then the rest of the plurals) and verbs in singular are used for one of the plurals and in plural for the other one o.O (example: 5 kobieta jest ...)

The dual verb system is also very hard for me to grasp ... and there are so many verbs, so many!!! It seams that for each small difference in an action comes up a new verb, while in portuguese we just reuse the same set of verbs for everything.

But I think that all of these stuff is the same for russian, so I would say that both are very hard if you don't know any slavic language yet.
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michau
Tetraglot
Groupie
Norway
lang-8.com/member/49
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86 posts - 135 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin
Studies: Spanish, Sign Language
Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic

 
 Message 45 of 125
04 December 2010 at 4:38pm | IP Logged 
Felipe Monteiro wrote:
Declension changes sometimes if something is animate or not, there are effectively 2 plurals (2,3,4,22,23,24,32,33,34,etc are declinated differently then the rest of the plurals) and verbs in singular are used for one of the plurals and in plural for the other one o.O (example: 5 kobieta jest ...)


Just a small correction:
1 kobieta jest ...
2(3,4,22,23,...) kobiety są ...
5(6,...) kobiet jest ...

Yes, it's hard. My native speaker intuition tells me the plural for 5 or more items stems from an expression "a group of", since its declension is similar:

grupa 2(3,4,5,6,...) kobiet jest ... = a group of X women is ...

Now the equivalence isn't complete though, since in "grupa 5 kobiet" the number is in genetive ("grupa pięciu kobiet"), while in "5 kobiet jest ..." the number is in nominative ("pięć kobiet jest ...").

So yeah, one still needs to memorise all the forms and rules. Good luck with learning Polish!


Edited by michau on 04 December 2010 at 4:39pm

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B-Tina
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Germany
dragonsallaroun
Joined 5529 days ago

123 posts - 218 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Polish

 
 Message 46 of 125
05 December 2010 at 2:51am | IP Logged 
michau: I noticed that you provide a text on Eläkeläiset on lang-8, so I just wanted to congratulate you on your excellent taste of music! ;-) Do you know the Polish Humppa Team?

On topic: the numerals still creep me out, so I totally agree with all of you that this is one of the worst parts polish grammar has to offer. Aspects and irregular declension/conjugation is hard as well, although I made some good experiences using the 10,000 sentences method (exposure, exposure, exposure).

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michau
Tetraglot
Groupie
Norway
lang-8.com/member/49
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86 posts - 135 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin
Studies: Spanish, Sign Language
Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic

 
 Message 47 of 125
05 December 2010 at 11:00am | IP Logged 
B-Tina wrote:
michau: I noticed that you provide a text on Eläkeläiset on lang-8, so I just wanted to congratulate you on your excellent taste of music! ;-) Do you know the Polish Humppa Team?


LOL, thanks. :) Yeah, I've heard of PHT. I thought it's a shame that Eläkeläiset is better known in Poland than in neighbouring Norway, so I decided to make an article about them in Norwegian Wikipedia, and wanted lang-8 people to check its correctness.

Quote:
On topic: the numerals still creep me out, so I totally agree with all of you that this is one of the worst parts polish grammar has to offer. Aspects and irregular declension/conjugation is hard as well, although I made some good experiences using the 10,000 sentences method (exposure, exposure, exposure).


I tried to learn some Czech some time ago, so I understand how hard Polish can be for a foreigner (Czech is related to Polish, but different enough to require learning declension rules from scratch). If I continued with Czech I would probably use Anki or other SRS to memorise:

- for all declension classes: the declension of a typical member of that class,
- important exceptions,
- for all prepositions and important verbs: what case is required by a given verb or preposition.

I guess this should apply equally well to Polish.

Edited by michau on 05 December 2010 at 11:01am

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Felipe Monteiro
Triglot
Newbie
Brazil
Joined 5549 days ago

4 posts - 4 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*, German, English
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 48 of 125
05 December 2010 at 4:58pm | IP Logged 
michau wrote:
I tried to learn some Czech some time ago, so I understand how hard Polish can be for a foreigner (Czech is related to Polish, but different enough to require learning declension rules from scratch). If I continued with Czech I would probably use Anki or other SRS to memorise:


What is Anki and SRS?


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