Jadoo1989 Diglot Groupie Joined 5635 days ago 51 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Irish, French
| Message 1 of 5 21 September 2013 at 8:07pm | IP Logged |
So, a professor at my university has offered to give me weekly Polish lessons for free. Right now, we're working through the first chapter Oscar Swan's First Year Polish course. I find the course to be great, especially with a teacher to help, but I did have some questions.
1) Where can I find the audio for the course, it doesn't seem to be on the publisher's website like the text is.
2) What other courses can I supplement this course with?
3) What's the best way to learn to read Polish and pronounce it correctly? For this step I usually shadowed Assimil hardcore. There isn't an English or Spanish base of the Polish course, and my French is only intermediate. Maybe I could make heads or tails of it if I tried to translate the lessons from French into English.
4) Any advice for learning Polish in general?
Edited by Jadoo1989 on 21 September 2013 at 8:29pm
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prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4861 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish
| Message 2 of 5 21 September 2013 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
PM me, we'll find a solution :]
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Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6107 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish
| Message 3 of 5 22 September 2013 at 12:45am | IP Logged |
A good place to start would be to read the Polish Profile found on this site.
It contains a lot of links to learning materials and learning stragegies.
We have a team (Team Żubr) for devotees of Polish language learning. Check out individual members' logs which illustrate the kinds of learning activities you could find useful.
I'm sorry I can't answer your query about Swan's audio material, perhaps someone else might know.
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pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5730 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian
| Message 4 of 5 23 September 2013 at 4:30pm | IP Logged |
Do you need to supplement your course? Maybe it will be enough or maybe your teacher will give you some materials. Assimil is good and use it if you can but I wouldn't try to use too many resources from the beginning.
If you need help with Assimil, I could translate some lessons for you into English. I will be away for a couple of days, but starting from Friday I could do it. :) Just PM me if you're interested. Maybe some other people will also join. I think I have a pdf of this course.
When it comes to pronunciation, it doesn't have to be shadowing. Simple "listen and repeat" will suffice. Assimil is be great for that. I'd concentrate on that.
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 5 of 5 30 September 2013 at 10:32pm | IP Logged |
As for the audio or video clips of Swan's online course for beginners, look in the folder "conversations" in this link. It doesn't seem complete since the files for the dialogues are only up to the 9th lesson but they're better than nothing.
The Polish Profile has some information about other courses or textbooks that could supplement what you'd be learning with Swan's course but what you choose is up to you. For getting pronunciation that's largely free of any distracting interference from your native language (a noticeable English accent in Polish really makes me cringe) all that I can think of is to listen and repeat or shadow dialogues. Pimsleur's courses for Polish could be useful but an expensive way to start coming to grips with pronunciation. As for advice, just keep plowing through the language and don't take it too hard if you feel unable to grasp some concept in the language. You're in it for the long-haul and unless you have some pressing need to attain a certain grasp of Polish for professional reasons in the short-term, thinking about the process as something that could last longer than a few months should lessen the chance of getting discouraged.
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