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Is Polish really that hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5987 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 65 of 125 31 January 2011 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually, I think this perpetuates a number of myths. It seems like many languages have this myth that they're impossible for foreigners to learn...Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, many others. They're not, though. Also, why would you assume that there's a "kind of person who really absorbs through listening"? In my mind, that's the only way to really learn a language...hundreds of hours of listening. This is how we all learn our native language, so we're all this "kind of person". Lastly, I can go to any country in the world and find foreigners there who haven't made a serious attempt to learn the local language. They hang out with other foreigners and try all sorts of ways *not* to learn the language. Many people are successful at not learning a language during their stay in a foreign country, and we can find many more examples of this in various threads on this forum....but it doesn't prove anything special about the languages in question. Polish isn't magical and special, just like Japanese and Hungarian aren't. Showing that 4-year-olds exist who can speak it just shows that it doesn't take any sort of magical intellect to learn it. I would perhaps argue, though, that trying to learn a bunch of grammar rules by rote is going to be much more difficult in Polish than, say, German, because there are many more exceptions to the rules, making them hard to manually calculate out. Instead, one should focus on absorbing it through exposure to comprehensible input. Clearly the brain can adapt to these weird rules without using conscious memorization (as proved by all the native speakers of Polish), so go find yourself some audiobooks. Luckily, Polish is one of the slavic languages with the most available content in audiobook and ebook format (together with Russian), so I would say that it appears to be much easier to learn at home than any of the other slavic languages, because most of the others lack the extensive materials that Polish has. Bulgarian, for example, seems to have very few audiobooks available, and almost none that aren't religious in nature. Polish has hundreds and hundreds to choose from. So, try being "that kind of person" that absorbs it from listening. It might lead to better results :) Edited by doviende on 31 January 2011 at 10:27am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5567 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 67 of 125 31 January 2011 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What doviende said. Although seriously after reading derevon's post, it really dampened my Polish learning spirit in
a way, coming from a practical stand point, simply as I know that I wont be spending much time in Poland in the next couple of years, and I don't know any young Polish people, although this can be changed. And obviously I'd really like to be able to have basic conversations in a language after studying it for a minimum of an hour a day for an entire year, and if someone is still struggling after 2 and a half years, whilst being in the country itself, it's a little daunting. Naturally though this isn't going to deter me from studying the language, but it would be nice to hear from a few people who have studied/are studying it, and have found results contrary to derevon in Poland. If simply just to keep the balance here. So to people who have and are studying this wonderful language, how are you finding it? What have you found in regards to using this language in the real world? How long did it take you to get to a basic conversation (roughly B1) level? Has it felt like the everest of languages? etc. 2 persons have 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 68 of 125 31 January 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I used to think it was hard. But then I found out that after a 9 months long full time
Polish course kids are ready to study at an University level in Polish. I've met quite a few of them and they are very fluent. Could it be that a school in Lodz is better than FSI in California? I'm not affiliated with them. http://www.sjpdc.uni.lodz.pl/index.html 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6106 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 69 of 125 31 January 2011 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been learning Polish, seriously, for just over 4 months.
If I listened to everyone who said 'it's too hard', 'what's the point', 'it took my friend 5 years...', then I'd feel like quitting. But my experience tells me something else: > LISTEN TO YOURSELF AND DECIDE Just because someone else says something, it doesn't mean it's true (at least for you). You try it, you discover it, you decide. Part of that decision of course involves listening to others. In my case I made an abortive attempt 2 years ago and it's only recently that I've been motivated enough and mentally prepared enough for a heck of a ride. It took a while to face the reality of the task ahead. Now, I enjoy it. I don't mind the complexity..BRING IT ON!! I read a lot of story books at first just to take the sting out of those scary consonant clusters. Now they're not scary anymore.....that's one dragon slain. My pronunciation has improved, vocabulary expanded and I'm feeling like I've made real progress. There's no avoiding the difficulty of the grammar, I agree. If you consider all the grammar in one go, you'll probably faint! So I just divide it into little pieces and tackle one piece at a time. I'm working my way through conjugations at the moment ....next irregular verbs.....next verbs of motion.....next verb aspects and when to use. I have to look at the huge mountain ahead, overcome the initial shock and discouragement, then plan and execute my first pitch. Slowly, inch by inch this mountain will be climbed! And BECAUSE it is hard, the victory will be ALL THE SWEETER. Spanish, French and German are all more familar to English speakers, there are similarities of words, structures. But Polish is very alien: 95% of the words are totally new, the grammar (7 cases, verb aspects, noun genders etc.) is new. SO...you can't joke around with it. I discovered that you need to seriously study it in the initial stages, and I mean 5 hours a day. Otherwise you won't build up the necessary momentum to get off the launch pad. You need to give this language a massive blast for the first 6 months just to get into 'orbit' then you'll feel committed enough to keep going. Other languages are hard, Hungarian, Japanese....but people learn them. Therefore Polish can be learned if one really wants to. Got to go....(a few monsters to slay) :) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| derevon Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5056 days ago 4 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Polish | Message 70 of 125 31 January 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
We are. When we are kids. As an adult things change a lot, though. Then our moulds are already cast (so to speak), and we're not really malleable anymore. Some people seem to retain this ability into adulthood, alas, most of us only do that to a very limited extent. As for "absorbing through listening", I mean when you understand what things mean without ever having looked up a word in a dictionary or ever had it explained to you. You can "feel it". To learn this way, you really need to be "tuned in" on a language. The more complex a language is and the more different from your own, the harder this is. For me, as a Swede, I could learn a lot of English this way (English being so much more similar to Swedish and I was also much younger), but I doubt I have learned more than a handful of Polish words just through listening. Of course, very common words that you hear all the time you pick up easily like "thank you", "good morning", "hello", but remember that Polish is an extremely inflected language, so everything takes much, much longer.
Of course. No one can expect to somehow magically learn a language just through living in a country where it's spoken if they aren't really exposed to it. My point is that not even studies and immersion constitute a guarantee of success.
Audiobooks, I'm afraid, aren't really all that helpful when it comes to learning a language as it's spoken in the real world. If, for example, somebody is giving a speech in Polish, and he/she speaks loud and clear, there are no noises etc, I can understand pretty much everything. The real problem, though, is to understand all the colloquialisms, slang expressions and to do this in a noisy environment. The day when you can sit at a pub and chat with your friends in a language effortlessly is the day you know you have really learned to speak this language in my opinion. In such environments I usally understand around 5% of what people say. I would only recommend people to study Polish seriously if A) They are very talented when it comes to learning languages, B) They intend to live in Poland for many years or C) They already know another Slavic language fluently. 2 persons have 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 71 of 125 31 January 2011 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is my test for basic fluency. I've used it when updating my language profile ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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