A language learners’ forum

Hello! So I've been trying to study polish for a few months but kept lapsing due to a lack of materials that I liked.

I recently came across http://lektorek.org/lektorek/ which is a textbook from the university of Pittsburgh. The site looks really old, and the audio files and exercises that accompany the textbook have broken links, but the textbook course itself is fantastic.

I asked my Polish friends about the words and expressions used in the book and they confirmed that they do indeed speak that way.

I only just finished lesson 1, (which took me about 6 hours over the course of a week to complete,) and I am floored by the quality of the textbook.

There's 10 lessons, I hope to complete lessons 1-3 before I go to Poland for two months in June and July, (I only have 3 weeks before I leave!)

HOWEVER since there are no audio files, I'm using Forvo and google translate's text-to-speech feature to double check the pronunciation of any words I am not sure how to pronounce 100%. I am also doing about 3 lessons of assimil a week and some shadowing so that I train my listening comprehension, as my impression as of this time is that Polish is going to be quite difficult in terms of listening comprehension unless I work on it regularly.

Before finding this course I used polishpod101.com and Assimil le Polonais sans peine. Lektorek.org's course is much better than either of these courses for those new to slavic languages, as it really breaks down the grammar in a slow and easily digestible way.

Hopefully this helps out any Polish learners who like myself, were struggling to find good self-study materials.

Thanks for pointing this out. Most of this material had been hosted by Prof. Swan for many years on his older website on a server for the University of Pittsburgh; that included a link to audio files for the first 9 chapters of First-Year Polish. He never seemed to have loaded all of the audio, and now has shifted things to lektorek which has been running for many years as a well with a bunch of electronic drills.

Some of the old audio material has been shifted here in zip files, although I see stuff only for the first 6 chapters.

Swan is an excellent author. The best Slovak course that I've ever used is his "Beginning Slovak", and got a lot out of his "Intermediate Polish" after having taken Polish 101 eons ago.

I have the original audio files that were recorded to accompany Professor Oscar E. Swan's audio-lingual course First Year Polish, 2nd Edition, 1983; I downloaded them from the University of Pittsburgh's website some years ago. I would point out that these recordings are "incomplete" in that, while they do cover all of the chapters, they do not include the sentence-pattern drills that are the underpinning of the audio-lingual method.

In addition, you might be interested in knowing that, in early 2015, Ohio State University completed the conversion of the re-recorded and augmented audio files accompanying Professor Swan's textbook, First Year Polish, 2nd Edition, 1983. These files do include the sentence-pattern drills along with supplementary recordings (vocabulary lists, dictation exercises, et cetera). As far as I understand, these files, including the expanded student notes, are still available for sale via the university's website.

Speakeasy, could you send me the polish audio? I've been looking everywhere for this and Ohio doesn't seem to have it anymore...