A language learners’ forum

Mówie po polsku!
or... not really.

I studied some polish two years ago. I focused mostly on reading and listening a lot, inspired by the ideas of Steve Kaufmann, in addition to memorizing words with anki.

So I thought I'd refresh what I learned then, because it is like I forgot everything. I'll go through the beginner book one more time. It is Langenscheidt Polnisch mit System. This time I will not use anki - instead I'll just write down all new vocabulary and see if that makes it stick (it will not be new after all).

After this I might use the mini-stories at Lingq.

Well, first day - chapter 1 of 20 done.

One question - how do you write the special polish letter ł in handwriting? When I write it it looks suspiciously like a t.

All the best with your return to Polish Tungemål! I have a feeling I might return to Polish this year at some point myself. Will you be spending much time on reviving and improving in the language?

With regards to writing the letter ł, just practice my friend. I also used to keep the horizontal bar short and emphasise the angle of it.

I'll just spend about half an hour a day. 20-30 days to go through the 20 chapters I guess. I'll read through the grammar sections, but all those endings seem almost impossible to learn.

tungemål wrote:I'll just spend about half an hour a day. 20-30 days to go through the 20 chapters I guess. I'll read through the grammar sections, but all those endings seem almost impossible to learn.

The best way I found to practice/learn the cases is using the first 10 lessons of "Beginning Polish" by Alexandre M. Schenker. It helps drilling in those ending deep into the brain.

tungemål wrote:
One question - how do you write the special polish letter ł in handwriting? When I write it it looks suspiciously like a t.

Polish kids are taught to write it like that - they put a horizontal line on top of the letter "l":



However, I tend to make a wave to distinguish it clearly from the letter "t". But most people say my handwriting is peculiar




"łata" means patch

Ok, thank you. That was not how I've been writing it. I'll adopt the official way.

tungemål wrote:After this I might use the mini-stories at Lingq.

you may have seen in my thread as I see you responded in there but just a heads up there are quite a few mistakes in the mini stories. There was a forum post a few days ago but another member who pointed a few but there are more than what he identified. There are a few spelling errors and incorrect declensions, I have a feeling it wasn't put together by a native speaker. I would have noted them all down and posted them on the forum but I didn't know there was a forum until afterwards.

I just ran through them out of interest myself, I think they are still ok to run through if you are refreshing.

Ok, thanks for the heads up. That's not good.
Is it only the text or is the reading of it also bad? If a native could listen to it they should be able to tell quickly if the reading aloud is done by a native speaker or not.

tungemål wrote:Ok, thanks for the heads up. That's not good.
Is it only the text or is the reading of it also bad? If a native could listen to it they should be able to tell quickly if the reading aloud is done by a native speaker or not.

I don't think it's so bad that it is unusable but it's worth bearing in mind. They're mostly small errors in spelling e.g a word ends in "e" when it should be "ę". Looking at the forums the problems are being identified by at least 1 user and there is a response saying they are looking at correcting it so hopefully that clears a lot of it up. I have only listened to a short bit of the audio but I believe it is a native speaker speaking and it seems to be good quality.

Update: I am at chapter 3. Half an hour for each chapter was a bit optimistic. Last time I didn't take the grammar notes seriously, but this time I read them carefully.

I am also thinking that I should set some goals to be able to speak on spesific themes. I got this idea from Richard Simcott.