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Is Polish really that hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 125 24 April 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Polish has 7 cases, only one more than Russian. It has 3 genders like Russian. The pronunciation should be a bit harder because it has nasal vowels and distinction between the different qualities of "ch" sounds like Mandarin. But then according to Wikipedia, Polish words are generally stressed on the second to last syllable, unlike Russian which has mobile stress.
But Polish is deemed the "hardest language to learn" by some, and some study has showed that while children of other languages reach fluency by age 12, Polish children don't until 16. Am I underestimating the language, or are other people overestimating it? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Smart Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5340 days ago 352 posts - 398 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Latin, French Studies: German | Message 2 of 125 24 April 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I feel it is up to one's opinion. You seem to have chosen 3 "difficult" languages, so Polish would probably be easier.
I do feel it is a difficult language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6853 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 3 of 125 24 April 2010 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Polish children can certainly speak earlier than that. I wonder what criteria they had for fluency. It's true that kids in some countries start speaking later than others. Wouldn't that be a better estimate? It's not difficult at all to find poor speakers of any language in any age group. _ edit: deleted a part of the message after another member pointed out a mistake in it Edited by Kubelek on 15 May 2010 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5465 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 4 of 125 24 April 2010 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly found Polish more difficult than Russian. As well as the seven cases, Polish
also has the irritating masculine genitive singular that can be (if I remember rightly) - a or -u with no specific rules. The locative case consonant changes: Praga - w Pradzie (again, correct me if I'm wrong!) are also hard to remember. The fact that adjectives go before and after nouns also presents a problem. On the other hand, Polish's regular stress is a godsend after Russian! I still think the former is harder though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ember Triglot Groupie CyprusRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5404 days ago 63 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, German Studies: Spanish, French, Greek, Polish | Message 5 of 125 25 April 2010 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if I have a right to say that, since I am a native Russian speaker, but in my opinion Polish is easier. First of all, due to its fixed stress, as TixhiiDon already mentioned. Besides, noun cases and verb conjugation systems are much more regular. But a lot of my friends from Europe who tried to study both Polish and Russian found Polish pronunciation more difficult because of all the sibilants.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5404 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 125 25 April 2010 at 11:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I find Polish easier to learn than Russian precisely because of the fixed stress in Polish. And at least to me Polish is easier since it is a Western Slavic language like Slovak. To a point they are mutually intelligible. Some of my acquaintances say they talked to Poles is both parties speak slowly and repeat themselves. The "sound" of the language is almost the same as Slovak unlike Russian which to us Slovaks "sounds "rude".
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6784 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 125 25 April 2010 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't comment on what it's like to learn as a foreign language, but in my view it's a pretty complex language compared to others that I know something about.
From a maintainability point of view it's the one causing me the most problems. Outside of a family setting I get almost no practice using it and that means I interact with a pretty narrow subset of it. The one thing I tend to screw up is the cases. One other thing I would raise is that the word order is somewhat puzzling. In Italian for example, this is pretty inflexible and sentences come out looking more predictable. In Polish you can juggle the words quite arbitrarily and still get a valid sentence. People will say "it doesn't sound as good", but that's a very vague measure. Let me find an example. Poszedłem (I went) do (to) szkoły (school) wczoraj (yesterday). Poszedłem do szkoły wczoraj. Poszedłem wczoraj do szkoły. Wczoraj poszedłem do szkoły. Wczoraj do szkoły poszedłem. Do szkoły poszedłem wczoraj. Do szkoły wczoraj poszedłem. And that's only 4 words, if you have a longer sentence you get a combinatorial explosion of variants.
This is supposed to be "w Pradze". 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5839 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 8 of 125 25 April 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess that's why many Poles are pretty good at languages. Seems it's easier to understand foreign grammar if your own native language has complex grammar.
I know one Polish person here in London who speaks fluent German and good Russian (although I've not heard him speak that). He also speaks good English. I read about a Polish woman who wanted to work as a dentist in Sweden. She learnt Swedish in six months, well enough to run a dental clinic. Plus, if their language is too hard for anyone else to learn, then it stands to reason that they instead have to learn other languages... lol 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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