Chove's Log (Spanish, German, Polish, French)

[chove]

I have been thinking about making a log, not so much to track my studying as to remind myself to do it and to keep a note of interesting things that I have learned. I am on a year out from a Language Studies degree with the Open University, which I may never actually finish for mostly health reasons (I have anxiety and depression and some OCD) but it gives me something to do during the day even though it can get pretty stressful at assessment times and if I fall behind a bit on the studying.

Anyway, today seems like a good day to actually make a log because for the first time ever I spoke more than one (1) word of Polish to a native speaker. My Polish is very, very basic and the most I've ever said before is "dzien dobry" (forgive the lack of special characters here) to an old woman at the gym, but today I was feeling a bit "up" and the driver of the taxi back from the supermarket was Polish and we spoke a bit about learning languages and I used a couple of phrases, the longest of which was "mowie troche po polsku ale niezbyt dobrze" so it wasn't an amazing in-depth conversation but it was my first go and I am quite pleased that I managed to speak to someone, let alone in another language.

[StringerBell]

Hi! It's very exciting to find other people learning Polish. Do you mind if I ask why you decided to learn it?

[Morgana]

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[Brun Ugle]

There are a number of us here (including me) who suffer from things like depression and anxiety. I find that while they can be so bad at times that it is impossible to study, other times studying actually helps. I find things like FSI drills kind of meditative sometimes. Other times I can lose myself in a Spanish series and forget about my own troubles. Congratulations on using your Polish. I’m usually too shy to say anything in another language until I’m good at it.

[chove]

Hi! It's very exciting to find other people learning Polish. Do you mind if I ask why you decided to learn it?

I liked the sound of it, and I hear it spoken around here quite a bit and was curious. It's an interesting challenge as well, with all those cases that I don't know yet!

[chove]

There are a number of us here (including me) who suffer from things like depression and anxiety. I find that while they can be so bad at times that it is impossible to study, other times studying actually helps. I find things like FSI drills kind of meditative sometimes. Other times I can lose myself in a Spanish series and forget about my own troubles. Congratulations on using your Polish. I’m usually too shy to say anything in another language until I’m good at it.

Yeah, some days I just find the idea of studying really tiring, or else it all seems somehow futile or pointless. It's why it's taken me so long to do this Open University course - I've been averaging about one academic year every two calendar years.

[chove]

I find that podcasts can be very good when I don't feel up to "proper studying." I can just lie down for a while and listen to something and it's generally relaxing. One of my favourites is the beginners stuff from Bloggy Polish, which seems to have ended in 2009 but they have such relaxing voices and it's put the basic stuff in my head really well. PolishPod101 is variable, with a lot of English that gets very repetitive because it's the same in every podcast and some of the dialogues are a bit odd. I also found it strange that the only case I've been introduced to in them is the locative, which seems a weird choice to start at and honestly I've not got that far anywhere else so it's not really something I've paid much attention to when I hear it.

I try to do my Anki most days as well, at least a bit of it. I know how fast it can become overwhelming, so I tell myself it's better to do about 20 words I don't really want to do rather than let it pile up for another day when I'll just get sick of it.

[StringerBell]

In the very beginning I started out with the 100 Daily Polish Stories for Absolute Beginners from RealPolish. I highly recommend them. You can listen and read to about 10 or maybe even 20 of them through LingQ for free. Those are both great resources in case you don't know about them yet. (You can even download the audio tracks and text from LingQ if you want to use them offline.) I found those 100 DPS to be really relaxing and I picked up a lot without feeling like I was "studying".

I didn't listen to the Bloggy Polish podcasts because I decided I didn't want to study any grammar rules in the beginning, but I might listen to some of them in the near future. Were there any specific episodes you really liked?

[chove]

I had assumed RealPolish would be beyond me, I might have a look.

I didn't listen to the Bloggy Polish podcasts because I decided I didn't want to study any grammar rules in the beginning, but I might listen to some of them in the near future. Were there any specific episodes you really liked?

Some of the episodes get into grammar but a lot of it is just some basic conversations to listen to and some vocab about food and whatnot. I don't really have favourite episodes, I mostly just listen to them in a loop when I'm trying to get to sleep, they have nice relaxing voices. (Except for one guy who screams "PO STAREMU!" in your ears at one point.) I wish they'd kept going longer, so that I could have them teaching me about cases and whatnot.

I also started on the Michel Thomas Polish Advanced CDs which I got from ebay second-hand. (I went through the basic stuff a year or so ago but from, erm, less acceptable sources that I no longer have access to anyway.) Sometimes the students annoy me and am I mistaken or does the teacher not actually have a Polish accent? Like, she seems to be a native speaker and she has a Polish name, but her accent sounds odd and I can't place it for the life of me.

[chove]

I have a weird relationship with German, in that I've learned it several times and it's stuck a bit but not much, and at one point I "divorced" it for good but now I am thinking of actually finishing my degree so that's not an option any more. I did it at school for four years (somehow didn't learn a single case though), then a beginners' course for a semester at a brick & mortar university when I was doing my history degree, and now I've picked it up again for the Open University degree I'm in the middle of.

Currently I should in theory know it to a low intermediate level, but I don't so I'm still picking up some basic stuff that went past me before or that I swiftly just forgot. I know how the cases work in theory now, at least, but tonight I looked at adjective endings again to make some sense of them. Just the definite and indefinite article ones in every case bar the genetive, but it looks like it's learnable. I just need to apply myself. Somehow. Ha!

I have German family members though a parent's remarriage so I feel like I *should* learn German, which honestly makes it seem like a chore sometimes. I do like it, and I enjoy learning it for the most part, but it feels obligatory which I don't like.