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Polish: another attempt

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 25 of 154
12 February 2008 at 5:03pm | IP Logged 
Day 2, posted a day late due to the forum being down last night:

I listened for several hours, and Listen-Read for one, doing chapters 6 and 7 of The Master and Margarita. I learned a fair number of words, and structure became clearer.

I found that the Sempé Goscinny texts are too difficult for me, as I read French fairly slowly, the speaker is extremely fast, and the Polish audio and text are clearly entirely different, and rather distant, translations.

atama-ga-ii (remove hyphens; the forum software automatically replaces his/her name) kindly provided me with several texts for Polish students of English. There was no audio, but they were quite useful. I especially liked one in the form of a short parallel text with several tiny snippets of each language; it gave me a slightly better idea of tenses, more basic vocabulary words, etc.


Edited by Volte on 12 February 2008 at 5:15pm

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 26 of 154
12 February 2008 at 5:10pm | IP Logged 
Day 3:

I listened to perhaps an hour of Polish, and Listen-Read for about 45 minutes (M&M chapters 8 and 9). This is, in my opinion, a useful amount of time, but too short to receive the full benefits - doubly so as I had a few minor interruptions, and I find it takes a couple of minutes for my brain to fully get into it. Nonetheless, I learned quite a few words. Best of all, I'm frequently (although still under half the time) able to draw correspondences between individual words in Polish and English in clauses with multiple words and no cognates, due to recognizing one or more of the Polish words.

Major areas to work on:
- I'm still hearing 'z' and 'w', which are whole words in Polish, somewhat strangely. I should make audio files of each isolated, and listen to them a significant amount, as well as carefully read phonetic descriptions. My brain is having trouble with syllabic consonants, it seems.

- I should really make a grammatical cheat sheet of Polish's case system and verb conjugations; this will help me correspond words of unknown meaning somewhat better, and deepen my understanding of the formation of words into clauses.

Basically, it was a rather slow day of study. Between major stuff going on at work, talks with a startup, and changing my sleep schedule to fit in more Polish, my Polish studies are lagging more than I would like. I intend to do significantly more L-R tomorrow.

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 27 of 154
13 February 2008 at 5:02pm | IP Logged 
Day 4:
I listened to a few hours of Polish, and Listen-Read slightly over 2 and a quarter hours. I had the feeling that vocabulary acquisition was fairly slow today, and I found a couple of words that I'd misinterpreted, but mainly found further confirmations of the ones I knew.

Polish keeps seeming more familiar; concepts like flexible word order are beginning to seem more natural, along with a sort of general Slavic style (for lack of a better description), in the use of articles, clause order, word order for emphasis, case endings, etc. It's a style I've seen in English written by speakers of other Slavic languages too.

One page of my parallel text didn't have corresponding English. The bits that I could pick out were still quite fragmentary. Still, I've only put in about 7 hours of L-R over these last 4 days.

Polish keeps reminding me more and more of Esperanto. They're very distinct languages, but the correlatives seem stylistically a bit like the Polish ones, and the use of commas is somewhat reminiscent as well. Polish affixes are less central to the language than Esperanto ones, but still fairly present.

The sound of 'z' as a whole word still gives me some trouble, but I haven't spent time listening to an isolated recording of it yet.


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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 28 of 154
14 February 2008 at 5:18pm | IP Logged 
Day 5:

Ouch. I listened to some Polish today, but enough stuff cropped up that I didn't manage to do any L-R.

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 29 of 154
15 February 2008 at 4:11pm | IP Logged 
Day 6:
Listened to some Polish, reviewed some grammar summaries ( http://www.polishgrammar.com/ and http://www.polish-translators.com/grammar.html ), and did an hour of L-R (chapters 13 and 14) after the grammar revision. Things continue to become clearer. In the grammar explanations, most of the cases looked somewhat familiar at this point, as did the example words; I was surprised at how straightforward it seemed.

I'm still far from natural listening, and my vocabulary is still much smaller than I'd like, but it's a bit heartening to know that I have picked up a lot despite it all.

1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 30 of 154
16 February 2008 at 5:08pm | IP Logged 
Day 7:
I finished 'book 1', doing chapters 16-18, which took about 2 hours (what happened to chapter 15? I did it, but I'm not sure whether it was today or yesterday).   I also listened to Polish radio for several hours, during times that I couldn't devote to L-R. My comprehension is steadily increasing. I could pick much more out of the radio than I could a week ago, but still far from everything; I still usually don't know what the topic is, and pick out mainly isolated words and set phrases.

Still, for 10 hours of L-R, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far.

1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 31 of 154
17 February 2008 at 3:48pm | IP Logged 
Day 8:
Another 2 hours of L-R, some listening, and some browsing Polish sites. I still understand a minority of what I read/hear, but I can navigate in Polish without major difficulty at this point, which is in stark contrast to a week ago.

Polish words float in my head at this point, and some 2-word phrases, but I can't construct much yet, unsurprisingly (given that I'm at 12 hours of study, spread out over a week).

1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6224 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 32 of 154
18 February 2008 at 5:08pm | IP Logged 
Day 9:
I did an hour and 3/4 of Polish L-R (chapters 23 and 24), and some listening. I'm noticing that I understand somewhat more words/phrases in songs at this point, and was very close to managing to put together the meaning of a 6-word phrase in one song; I saw how to spell 5 of the words in my head, with an idea of what they meant, but couldn't quite bring together the meaning of the whole yet.

Edit: I'm also starting to get a vague idea of aspect; I've had a vague idea about tenses for the last few days.


Edited by Volte on 18 February 2008 at 5:41pm



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