Thanks for all the responses and suggestions.
POLISH:I'm not sure exactly what is going on with Polish at the moment. I think we are having a lovers' spat.
I've been feeling really mad at the language and I'm not sure if I will continue with it. I can now see that being able to speak simply (though grammatically correct) is not possible for me. So, I'm trying to decide if I can be satisfied with any of these options:
1) give up totally on speaking and just focus on improving listening/reading.
2) continue speaking in a way that is riddled with tons of mistakes forever.
3) accept that even though I love this language and gave it my best, it just isn't for me.
One of my major obstacles is that I don't improve AT ALL if I'm corrected during conversation. This has been a major hinderance for me with Italian. Even my husband (who is a big believer that to get better at speaking, a person has to do it a lot and get corrected) has told me that he no longer believes that speaking a lot is the way for me to make improvements, because he's seen first hand that I don't remember or incorporate corrections. They are a total waste of time for me in a conversation. If I'm corrected while I'm talking, the other person might as well not say anything at all. With Italian, even if he's corrected me on something 10x in a day, I will continue making that mistake until I sit down and fill up page(s) with written reinforcement of the correct way. My auditory memory seems to be non-existent. This is the reason I stopped my Italian speaking challenge last year and switched to more reading and writing, which made a difference for me. But I'm already doing A TON of reading and scriptorium writing in Polish, and there's only so much I can do before my hand falls off.
So, I will not get better by having my mistakes corrected by a native speaker because (1) I don't learn that way, and (2) I am making a huge amount of mistakes, and (3) if I don't even understand why the correction is being made it's extra meaningless to me. I started writing out corrected sentences multiple times, but the minute I stopped doing it, I forgot all the corrections, and I'm confident that I wouldn't be able to say/write most of those same sentences correctly anymore.
Grammar rant: don't read this if you're not in the mood for a bunch of whining and complainingI was hoping that after tons and tons of exposure (I'm up to 1,500 hours) a lot of grammar would be obvious and I'd have a good enough feel for what sounded right that learning the rules and applying them wouldn't be too big of a deal. This is not what's happened, unfortunately. There are a few cases that I do have a feel for and can apply, but it's really a tiny percentage.
I'm feeling particularly angry because I'm realizing that in some instances, the case ending thing is pointless; in Biernik/Accusative, neuter words and masculine inanimate word don't change the ending at all (and neither do the plurals regardless of gender) which tells me that these case endings aren't actually necessary for understanding the meaning of the sentence. This makes me feel extremely resentful. I can accept the idea of case endings if they are actually necessary for understanding but if a ton of words don't change at all, then what's the point of changing the others?
Then there's the fact that a lot of case endings overlap, which makes them extra confusing, or that masculine words sometimes take on endings that make them look like they're feminine, or that in dopełniarz/genitive there's a list of 423,000 nouns that are masculine inanimate that take a particular ending but 715,000 masculine inanimate nouns that take a different ending... I better not get started on dopełniarz/genitive, I could write a novel just ranting about how ridiculously convoluted that case is. I can't deal with the frustrating level of complexity that's involved in identifying the case and figuring out what the ending should be based on whether the word is masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, neuter. And the whole masculine animate/masculine inanimate thing makes me especially angry. Fruit and vegetables and names of cars are animate????
I know that
every language has a ton of nonsense that you just have to accept, but I don't know if I have it in me to deal with this particular level of nonsense.
It's too much, man! (<<<BoJack reference). Breaking it down and just focusing on one tiny part of one case doesn't work for me. Doing hours and hours of grammar exercises don't work for me because I can't apply any of those exercises to real life speaking...and I hate doing hours and hours and hours of grammar exercises. I hate it.
My understanding still feel light years away from where I can enjoy native materials; I think it will be years before I can understand the majority of what people say in a TV show or to even be able to read Young Adult books without a parallel text and that's making me feel particularly demotivated. I know that comprehension takes time, but after 1,500 hours I still feel like a beginner who can't say the most basic sentences correctly (like anything that's negative or involves a plural) and that's not a good feeling. In fact, it's making me questioning what I accomplished during all those hours.
So, I think I will take a break from Polish and see how I feel about it in a little while. Maybe once my frustration dissipates I'll decide to return to Polish, or maybe I'll decide that I've reached my limits and it's time to focus my energy elsewhere.