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Is Polish really that hard?

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
125 messages over 16 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 10 ... 15 16 Next >>
doviende
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
languagefixatio
Joined 5780 days ago

533 posts - 1245 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese

 
 Message 73 of 125
31 January 2011 at 9:31pm | IP Logged 
I'll admit that I have almost zero knowledge of Polish currently, but your statements seem to describe a particular level of skill in a language that many other people have experienced in many languages.

Learning from listening has little to do with attempts to learn absolutely everything by guessing from context. That may be an interesting passtime for some, but I find it inefficient. Both dictionary lookups and parallel texts will speed you along the way. One need not be in the "everything purely from context" camp to advocate lots of listening. To be able to understand spoken language well, and to better adapt to situations where there are lots of new words being said, it helps to listen to many hundreds of hours of comprehensible input. Comprehensible is key here. Listening to totally unknown input is hard, and takes much longer.

With a proper parallel text, however, a story can become very clear very fast, and it allows vocabulary to be learned at a tremendous rate. Every sentence can be made comprehensible merely by glancing across at the translated side. Witness, for example, Teango's amazing progress last year with his "study and click" strategy, with which he achieved fast results in Swedish, and is currently using with much success in Russian.

Through listening and reading and watching TV, I was able to pass the "bar conversation" test in German, and I plan to attempt this in Polish at some point too. I don't think it'll be much different, except that it'll take longer due to the increased linguistic distance.
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slavonica
Triglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4840 days ago

10 posts - 12 votes
Speaks: Polish*, German, English
Studies: Russian, Czech

 
 Message 75 of 125
01 February 2011 at 3:02pm | IP Logged 
Spelling "sz" instead of "ż" is no mistake. It's just a way you spell it, a kind of assimilation, which comes often in many slavic languages.
We don't use diacritic signs, because we just don't need them in Internet. It's just like in Russian - you don't write any accents over the words nor you use f.e. the letter "ё", you just write "e", because the people just know, how to spell it.
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Cabaire
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5393 days ago

725 posts - 1352 votes 

 
 Message 76 of 125
01 February 2011 at 3:27pm | IP Logged 
Spelling "sz" instead of "ż" is no mistake. It's just a way you spell it, a kind of assimilation, which comes often in many slavic languages.
We don't use diacritic signs, because we just don't need them in Internet. It's just like in Russian - you don't write any accents over the words nor you use f.e. the letter "ё", you just write "e", because the people just know, how to spell it.


I do not think so. Accents are no part of the Russian orthography and the use of ё is optional. But if I see "ksiąszka" written, it is a spelling error, although you pronounce it with [ʃ], not [ʒ]. The reason lies in the history of language, because książka is derived from księga, where the /g/ is voiced. This is the principle of morphological / historical orthography opposed to a phonemic orthography.

In the same way you cannot write "Sak, ist der Tak windik?" for "Sag, ist der Tag windig?" ("Say, is the day windy"), although you pronounce the /g/s as [k]s.

PS. If you leave out the diacritical marks, because they are not available or one is to lazy to type them, you get ksiazka.

Edited by Cabaire on 01 February 2011 at 3:32pm

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slavonica
Triglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4840 days ago

10 posts - 12 votes
Speaks: Polish*, German, English
Studies: Russian, Czech

 
 Message 78 of 125
01 February 2011 at 4:09pm | IP Logged 
Hey, but you wrote about spelling, not writing. Ortography has nothing to do with spelling. And "ksiąszka" is an ortographic mistake, nothing else. Where it comes from you don't have to tell me, I'M polish native speaker :)
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Kubelek
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal
Joined 6646 days ago

415 posts - 528 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish
Studies: German

 
 Message 79 of 125
01 February 2011 at 4:28pm | IP Logged 
When I type notes or messages online I don't use Polish characters (unless the register
requires it). I see how this could be a problem for a non-native speaker, but I don't
think it slows me down. It's faster to type that way and I do touch type. My spelling has
deteriorated in ~5 years of doing that, though, especially 'ę' since it is correct to
pronounce it 'e' in many instances.
I looked at my facebook wall out of curiosity and it seems like I'm a moribund species of
lazy typists. All of my friends have started using diactrical marks once again.
1 person has voted this message useful



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