Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

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Polish Paralysis
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Fri Jul 05, 2019 12:21 pm

cjareck wrote:Thanks! Looks interesting. I will have to put some effort into my French and bring it on better level. There are also some interesting podcasts:
Learn French with Vincent: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEf0-W ... Ztx43KPvag
Francais avec Pierre: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... vec+pierre
Mayby you do not know them.


Thanks for the great suggestions. I will definitely take a look. The two I had discovered to date were Inner French and Français Authentique. Both are surprisingly easy to understand for English speakers with even a rudimentary knowledge of French. In some ways it pains me to think I can listen to Podcasts in French at almost the same level as Polish even after months and months of listening to Polish; although I can definitely understand normal paced Polish way better than I can understand normal paced French. It's great that in general Poles enunciate well and that there are not that many accents as far as I'm aware.
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby lusan » Fri Jul 05, 2019 7:19 pm

Polish Paralysis wrote: In some ways it pains me to think I can listen to Podcasts in French at almost the same level as Polish even after months and months of listening to Polish; although I can definitely understand normal paced Polish way better than I can understand normal paced French. It's great that in general Poles enunciate well and that there are not that many accents as far as I'm aware.


I had the same feelings. First I was very angry with myself until I realized that been a Spanish native helps a lot. I told myself that my B1 journey would be pretty long. So I decided to climb the French B2 ladder. French is a beautiful language.
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Polish Paralysis
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Sat Jul 13, 2019 11:37 am

I have decided to put off learning French until such time as my Polish is at a strong B2/C1 level. This might take a year or two to achieve but I think it is the best option for me. I was simply spending too much time on French, almost to the exclusion of Polish. I have no current use for French and I was learning it simply for enjoyment.

My progress this week:

I discovered a few more youtube channels that I like. For me, these are a fantastic way to learn because they are subject-specific and in everyday language.
Nauka. To lubię (Science) - Watched about 10 videos 2 or 3 times over
Everyday Hero (Guy who discusses ethical issues and who has a nice philosophical outlook) - As above
Tomek Grzymski (Fitness and gym) - As above

I listened to about 20 mins of my audiobook (Czerwony alert) before going to bed every night. My comprehension isn't the best. I understand about 75% of the message and 60% of the words, but I am enjoying it nonetheless and in any case I plan on listening to it once and then L-Ring it, which should lead to much higher comprehensibility by the end.

Edit: grammar
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Wed Jul 17, 2019 6:30 pm

Just a small progress report and some musings.

I managed to listen to an entire audiobook for the first time namely Mózg rzadzi. I found it surprisingly easy to understand. Being in my last year of medical studies, I was familiar with a lot of the studies which made it easily comprehensible.
I also watched some Youtube videos:
Magdalena Bajsarowicz - All about divorce. A bit depressing but fairly easy to understand (5 hours)
I also had a class with my iTalki teacher.


My comprehension is definitely improving. I don't expect my speaking to improve tremendously any time soon but I am happy with my current trajectory I suppose.

Ideally, I will be at a "mildly okay" conversational level in 6 or so months time, as I will have to move in with my fiancee's family for about half a year. This includes her non-English speaking Mom. At my current trajectory, wishing for such progress might be wishful thinking. I wonder if I would be able to make substantial progress now that I am in a position to understand a considerable amount of Polish?

If anyone has experience in moving away from a comprehensible input approach to a strongly output approach, I would be interested to know if you were able to make quick progress in being able to conduct conversations in the given language. I was considering taking this approach with the looming threat of needing to make conversation with my future mother-in-law. Any comments to that effect would be greatly valued.

Plans for the upcoming week:
Listen to the same audiobook 1 or 2 more times
Watch some more youtube videos I find interesting
iTalki
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby StringerBell » Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:51 pm

Do you listen to your audiobook without ever having read the text, or have you already read it and now you're listening only?
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Polish Paralysis
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Fri Jul 19, 2019 6:40 am

StringerBell wrote:Do you listen to your audiobook without ever having read the text, or have you already read it and now you're listening only?


In this particular case I did not read the text. I found that I was able to keep my comprehension above 80% almost the entire time, so I didn't bother reading it. My ultimate goal is to listen to the book 2 or 3 times with over 80-90% comprehension and let the brain do its magic.

I use this strategy primarily because of the experience I had with learning Chinese. I worked in a Chinese hotel and every day, my colleagues would have a meeting conducted only in Chinese. I wasn't bothering with learning the language at the time because I thought it was out of my reach. I did however look up the odd word on a dictionary app called Pleco. What was strange was that after 2-3 months of being there I could understand almost everything that was said in this specific meeting. It was at this point I realised that our brain is hard-wired so as to understand languages as long as you give them enough auditory input and a little bit of either context or meaning.

I would therefore only read a book in order to facilitate the final step of listening a number of times.

There are a few reasons why I avoid reading if I have the chance to do so. Firstly, I enjoy moving around while listening to Polish. Secondly, reading feels like a lot more work. Thirdly, I hate the sound of my sub-vocalisation. As much as I have tried to work on my Polish pronunciation, I still struggle with it. Even reading something simple like "miłego dnia" causes me tension because the process is simply still too conscious. It's kind of like driving a stick shift for the first few times. Your mind simply has too many things to think about. Mi (palatalized - tongue must go up) - ło (o must sound like a Polish o) - go (same) - dnia (palatalized - but I have trying to palatalize d and n together). This is definitely becoming easier, but because I took such a reductionist approach to learning the sounds it's taking a while to make the process more subconscious.

Enjoy your time off by the way :) I sometimes wish I wasn't so darn obsessed with this language!
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Thu Jul 25, 2019 7:09 pm

Had a fairly good week as far a Polish goes. I have watched a lot of Youtube (probably over 2 hours a day). I failed to listen to my audiobook on account of having discovered a few new Youtube channels that interest me.
For anyone who is interested they are:
Wojna Idei (I would say its subject matter is mostly sociology and psychology)
Człowiek Absurdalny (this guy talks really slowly for those who have touch time watching youtube videos without subtitles - i.e. me a month ago. I am not however sure if he says the words slowly or just pauses a great deal between words)

I am going to test out a new strategy this week. I am going to go from very input-based learning to a strongly output based approach. I will continue to watch one 7 or 8 min youtube video a day, but I will primarily be focusing on output. I will also be making use of 2 of the cheaper iTalki teachers and 3 conversation partners. It will be interesting to see whether I will benefit from this approach. I'm not sure whether 1 hour of output a day (most of which will inevitably be spent listening) will be enough for me to make quick progress. I really want to automate certain thoughts in Polish and certain constructions and I hope increased output will benefit me in this respect.

I am also planning to do a bit of writing. This is something that feels borderline impossible for me at the moment. Lang8 is not accepting new members for some reason at the moment so maybe I will use iTalki.
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby lusan » Thu Jul 25, 2019 8:47 pm

Polish Paralysis wrote:Had a fairly good week as far a Polish goes. I have watched a lot of Youtube (probably over 2 hours a day). I failed to listen to my audiobook on account of having discovered a few new Youtube channels that interest me.
For anyone who is interested they are:
Wojna Idei (I would say its subject matter is mostly sociology and psychology)
Człowiek Absurdalny (this guy talks really slowly for those who have touch time watching youtube videos without subtitles - i.e. me a month ago. I am not however sure if he says the words slowly or just pauses a great deal between words)

I am going to test out a new strategy this week. I am going to go from very input-based learning to a strongly output based approach. I will continue to watch one 7 or 8 min youtube video a day, but I will primarily be focusing on output. I will also be making use of 2 of the cheaper iTalki teachers and 3 conversation partners. It will be interesting to see whether I will benefit from this approach. I'm not sure whether 1 hour of output a day (most of which will inevitably be spent listening) will be enough for me to make quick progress. I really want to automate certain thoughts in Polish and certain constructions and I hope increased output will benefit me in this respect.

I am also planning to do a bit of writing. This is something that feels borderline impossible for me at the moment. Lang8 is not accepting new members for some reason at the moment so maybe I will use iTalki.


I share your feeling regarding the troubles with Polish. I just began to use fsi French. And I wonder if the solution to the out problem is given by simple going through the Beginning Polish vol 1 of Alexander Schenker. It might be worthy a try. All the audio are availables - about 80- It would be a lot of work but the drill, I suspect, are the way to go. I would do the, if I were planning to move to Poland.
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Polish Paralysis
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby Polish Paralysis » Thu Jul 25, 2019 9:18 pm

lusan wrote:I share your feeling regarding the troubles with Polish. I just began to use fsi French. And I wonder if the solution to the out problem is given by simple going through the Beginning Polish vol 1 of Alexander Schenker. It might be worthy a try. All the audio are availables - about 80- It would be a lot of work but the drill, I suspect, are the way to go. I would do the, if I were planning to move to Poland.


I was thinking of doing that. I think I might ease my way into it though actually. I need something that will help me retain the huge amount of information now that sounds and speech are less of a problem. I was thinking of maybe starting to do half an hour of clozemaster/anki sentences everyday. I like sentence level analysis of grammar and I usually find it simple enough to deduce the rules at a sentence level.

In the long run I know my biggest struggles are going to be going to be the verb and the subtleties of Polish verbs as well as perfective and imperfective verbs as well as gaining enough of an active vocabulary to speak freely.

Here is an example of the issue of verbs that I found on reddit:

By using prefixes you get many different meanings from the "palić" base.

palić (się) - to heat / burn
dopalić (się) - "to burn to the end" (you may wait for the bonfire to "dopalić się")
odpalić (no "się" here) - to ignite (a fuse, an engine) / detonate (a bomb)
przypalić - to burn / cauterize (food on your frying pan)
spalić - to burn totally (i.e. town to the ground or get too much suntan)
podpalić - to set on fire (what arsons do)
upalić (się) - to get stoned with joints
wypalić - "burn all of it" (i.e. to smoke all the cigarettes)
zapalić - to ignite / set on fire (a cigarette)

As far a the perfective and imperfective forms go, I was thinking of writing out a bunch of sentences in all the different tenses that we have in English and seeing how they would be translated into Polish.
E.g. I was walking when...
I used to...
I had been... when

Then hopefully I can draw a 1:1 concordance between the tenses in English and the Polish use of aspects.

I also quite like the look of some of the drawings that Donovan Nagel has made like the one on this page for instance:
https://www.mezzoguild.com/how-to-learn-grammar/

Anyway thats all from me for today, I think.
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Re: Polish (with a sprinkling of French)

Postby lusan » Thu Jul 25, 2019 10:04 pm

Polish Paralysis wrote:I was thinking of doing that. I think I might ease my way into it though actually. I need something that will help me retain the huge amount of information now that sounds and speech are less of a problem. I was thinking of maybe starting to do half an hour of clozemaster/anki sentences everyday. I like sentence level analysis of grammar and I usually find it simple enough to deduce the rules at a sentence level.


I tried that. It did not work for me. Clozemaster/anki are too limited dealing with cases, verbs and insane polish logic. There is no time to think in this language. Too complex.

Polish Paralysis wrote:In the long run I know my biggest struggles are going to be going to be the verb and the subtleties of Polish verbs as well as perfective and imperfective verbs as well as gaining enough of an active vocabulary to speak freely.


The distinction is not so hard after a while the real problems with the verbs are as just noted.... the prefixes... they follow a logic of their own sometimes.... so each verb might have 20+ different meaning... as well as the multiplicative effects of perfective/imperfective. what I did was to split the language into passive and active. I limited the active to day to day talk and the other I dumped into the reading bucket. I do not worry about them anymore.

Maybe the list on 300 Polish Verb book is good enough. The rest will happen if and only ever. I will hang around B1 by reading books and watching youtubes until I have the need for more. If so, I trust in Schenker -I hope.

Polish Paralysis wrote:I also quite like the look of some of the drawings that Donovan Nagel has made like the one on this page for instance:
https://www.mezzoguild.com/how-to-learn-grammar/



I will check Nagel out.
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