2017 Polish Log

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solocricket
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Studying: Polish (A1)
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2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Fri Mar 03, 2017 6:26 am

After a bit of a language learning break, I'm back at it with Polish. Polish is a language I've dabbled in before-- in 2014-2015, I spent an entire year going to a Polish language church that happened to be in the (American) town I was working in :D I have Polish heritage, as well, so that's a motivator. It's also a cool, fun Slavic language-- I think if I get any good at Polish, I would love to branch out into other Slavic language, much like I have with Romance ones.

So, I've been truly studying Polish since last fall, though I took a couple months off around the holidays. I picked it back up this past month. I was doing Duolingo mixed in with some SRS sentences/vocab from the University of Pittsburgh first year course, but I've since abandoned Duolingo since I just find it tedious and slow-moving. Right now, I've been working through the same course (I'm on Lesson 3, and they're pretty lengthy lessons), and I'm adding 20-50 Anki cards a day (both single vocab items and full sentences with translations). I'm also reading the first Harry Potter book in Polish, though at this point, it really is just picking out words I recognize and figuring out where I am in the story. For listening practice, I have talk radio on a couple hours during the day-- either a Chicago station or Polskie Radio 24. I'm liking how easy it is to find high-quality Polish stuff in the US-- there are several online US bookstores that sell Polish literature and radio is easy to find.

Right now, I'm at ~600 Anki cards, and I'm hoping to reach 1000 (??) this month! As for reading, I'm hoping to work through Harry Potter 1, Roald Dahl's Matilda, and then a sci-fi novel written in native Polish. I'll (hopefully) keep this log updated with progress and new resources.
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Mooby
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby Mooby » Fri Mar 03, 2017 12:21 pm

Cześć :D
Good to hear that you are getting back into Polish, I look forward to following your progress.
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solocricket
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Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Fri Mar 03, 2017 5:41 pm

Forgot to list my goals with Polish-- I'm hoping to reach an intermediate-ish level by late summer. To me, that means...

-Reading: being able to comfortably read general fiction (NOT literature) with only a few words per page to look up
-Listening: being able to listen to formal news radio and animated TV shows and understand what's going on (rather than native Polish films or casual talk shows, which I think are more difficult)
-Writing: being able to communicate on forums/other short forms with errors only if I'm using constructions I don't know
-Speaking: being able to speak conversationally, talk about myself

I suppose that would be B2-ish for reading and listening, and around B1/A2 for writing and speaking.

I tend to focus on the "passive" skills more, and I value them more. I would rather be able to understand radio and read than be able to express myself quickly and relatively fluidly and not understand the response. Also, I'm antisocial, so I don't get much speaking practice ever :D That being said, I would like to focus on writing in a couple of months, after a bit of a silent period (maybe participating on forums or Lang-8). As for speaking, I don't have plans apart from reading out loud and talking to myself. I'll be using the passive skills more to measure my progress :)
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solocricket
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Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Mon Mar 06, 2017 5:40 pm

I have acquired a dictionary! The Oxford Essential Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary. Totally not necessary, but I like owning a dictionary for languages I'm seriously studying. Also, I think browsing through a real, ink-and-paper dictionary is an experience hard to replicate with online resources....

Anyways, still sticking to the same routine thus far. I'm hoping to finish Lesson 3 of the UPitt course this week. I'm not really following the course as it's meant to be studied. I'm simply adding sentences and vocab to Anki and skimming grammar sections. I'm not doing any of the exercises.

Next week, I'll be traveling, so that might limit the amount of time I can spend on Polish.

I'm getting quite excited about how much Polish I'm understanding. The Slavic languages have always fascinated me (I've also messed around with Russian and Czech), and it's neat to think learning Polish will make future Slavic endeavors easier. It feels like learning French all over again-- French, my first Romance language, seemed so difficult, and then Spanish and Italian just sort of made sense after that.
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DCDC
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby DCDC » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:48 pm

solocricket wrote:and then a sci-fi novel written in native Polish.

Pewnie coś Stanisława Lema? :)
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solocricket
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Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:37 pm

DCDC wrote:
solocricket wrote:and then a sci-fi novel written in native Polish.

Pewnie coś Stanisława Lema? :)


Tak, moja książka jest Bajki robotów :D
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solocricket
Orange Belt
Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=5502
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Contact:

Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Wed Mar 08, 2017 7:09 pm

Reached 840 Anki cards (yay!). I'm a bit over halfway through Lesson 3, so hopefully I'll be able to finish that by Friday. I really like how this course covered the locative case-- lots of examples and no "rules" of how to form it. I just entered a ton of vocab items (places, rooms in a house, etc.) with the nominative and locative case together. I like that it's practical. I can always find a table or something later, but right now, I like that the cases are being introduced with TONS of examples.

Generally with my Anki-based language learning (which I did for French and Spanish), I noticed I made huge improvements around 1000 cards. Around 1000-1500, I felt I could call myself solidly intermediate, and I felt more comfortable with the language. I'm guessing I won't reach that kind of level with Polish until 2000-2500 cards, because of the unfamiliar grammar and lack of cognates. Who knows, but I'm certainly not holding out for intermediate-level knowledge in only 200 more cards :)

Using Anki with Polish thus far has been pretty easy. I type with the Polish Programmers' keyboard setup, which has become pretty intuitive to use. I'm only adding cards (mostly example sentences, but lately more single vocab items-- all with English translations on the back) from the UPitt course. It's so addictive to keep typing in cards once I'm in the groove that I find I'm adding around 50 cards/day the last few days. That's not entirely positive, since I'll have about 150 reps the next day.... I had to take a break last weekend from adding cards so that I could catch up. But that's okay since I'm going on vacation next week, and I'll probably stick to simply doing reps most days.

Another note-- most of the time I'm lazy and will punch the space bar to rate the card "good" whenever I'm doing reps. However, I've swallowed my pride and I'm "failing" more of the cards-- and that has greatly improved my recall!
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lusan
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Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby lusan » Wed Mar 08, 2017 8:34 pm

solocricket wrote:Generally with my Anki-based language learning (which I did for French and Spanish), I noticed I made huge improvements around 1000 cards. Around 1000-1500, I felt I could call myself solidly intermediate, and I felt more comfortable with the language. I'm guessing I won't reach that kind of level with Polish until 2000-2500 cards, because of the unfamiliar grammar and lack of cognates. Who knows, but I'm certainly not holding out for intermediate-level knowledge in only 200 more cards :)


Dios Santo! Be aware that Polish is different animal than French or Spanish. I do about 500 cards a day and study 3 to 4 hours 7 days a week. And it is now, oh silly me, when I feel comfortable having a A2-B1 Conversation and watch movies with polish subtitles on! I do not understand the news because book vocabularies are so different, etc. The 7 cases and the exceptions by the millions are killer machines. I concluded that Polish was created to test our self-discipline... or to keep foreigners out. :lol:
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User avatar
solocricket
Orange Belt
Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=5502
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Contact:

Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:11 pm

lusan wrote:
solocricket wrote:Generally with my Anki-based language learning (which I did for French and Spanish), I noticed I made huge improvements around 1000 cards. Around 1000-1500, I felt I could call myself solidly intermediate, and I felt more comfortable with the language. I'm guessing I won't reach that kind of level with Polish until 2000-2500 cards, because of the unfamiliar grammar and lack of cognates. Who knows, but I'm certainly not holding out for intermediate-level knowledge in only 200 more cards :)


Dios Santo! Be aware that Polish is different animal than French or Spanish. I do about 500 cards a day and study 3 to 4 hours 7 days a week. And it is now, oh silly me, when I feel comfortable having a A2-B1 Conversation and watch movies with polish subtitles on! I do not understand the news because book vocabularies are so different, etc. The 7 cases and the exceptions by the millions are killer machines. I concluded that Polish was created to test our self-discipline... or to keep foreigners out. :lol:


Definitely! I'm well aware that Polish is not like the Romance languages :) What resources are you using (I can obviously use more), and where do you find movies?
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solocricket
Orange Belt
Posts: 157
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2015 4:21 pm
Location: USA
Languages: My good languages: English (N), French (C1), Spanish (B2), Italian (reading knowledge)
Languishing Languages: Dutch (~B1), Icelandic (delapidated passive intermediate skills), Yiddish (basic passive), Japanese (smattering of reading knowledge, lots of vocab, maybe I'll get back to it someday)
Studying: Polish (A1)
Wish List: Chinese, Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew... yep
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=5502
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Contact:

Re: 2017 Polish Log

Postby solocricket » Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:00 pm

Just discovered Radio Dzieciom on the Polskie Radio app-- it's aimed at kids! I really enjoy kids' media. There's a lot of cartoony, over-emphasized talking. I don't like the abundance of English songs, but that's okay because the rest of it adds some variety to my listening. I've also been listening a bit to the podcast Masa Kultury, which is some pop-culture content. Since the majority of my listening consists of dry news radio, having more casual resources is nice.
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