Hello guys, I lurk on this forum nearly everyday, but I only posted here twice, (actually 3 times, but it was the same post twice because I was copying and pasting the question into multiple forums - sorry again lol)
I wrote this super long and detailed post to give back to the community here, since I've learned a lot of great stuff from this forum, and want to enrich it further, (and since most of you guys love Poland.) One of my sources of income is working as "language learning related stuff" consultant with companies and "business men" in Europe, so this is something I am actually knowledgeable enough about to give honest advice.
My Background:(skip if you just want to read the "how to" part.) I'm from the USA and I'm a "polyglot" I put the word in parenthesis, because I would never actually call myself that, if people ask why I speak so many languages, or how I speak their language with no accent etc. I say I'm a linguist, (which is actually not true, but most people think that means you know a lot of languages.) I actually didn't even study anything language related in College. I speak 6 languages "fluently" and I've learned two of those languages, (as an adult,) to a level where people most of the time think I'm a native speaker. I've studied lots of other languages, and if I had to list the number of languages that I've had a 5minute + conversation with a native in, (not a teacher or tutor etc.) I would add about 5 more to those 6 languages that I speak fluently and use regularly.
So I'm gonna say the sad truth: learning languages takes lots of time, and the faster you learn the faster you forget - so all those random languages I "speed learned" in College etc. I "speed forgot." Keep this in mind when learning a new language. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
11 months ago I moved to Poland. I spent my first month in Łódź, then 6 weeks in the south of Poland living with a family that spoke no English, (I can elaborate on why and how this happened.) and then I moved to Warsaw. Before I came here I knew maybe 20 words, if that.
I'm going to talk about what YOU should do, and then tell you what I did. If I had to do it over again, I would do it a lit bit differently.
Step 1: LEARN THE ALPHABET and the SOUNDS of Polish
Learn how to read a word and pronounce it correctly. This is crucial. If you read a word wrong, and then remember it that way, when a Pole says it to you in conversation, you won't be able to understand them because your mental representation of how the word sounds doesn't align with the way it's being said. Listening comprehension is very difficult in Polish. If you had problems understanding Spanish, you're gonna have a bigger problem understanding spoken Polish. However, if you focus on the right things from the beginning, you won't have a problem down the road.
Here's what I mean, exactly: When you start with Babbel's program, (I'll talk about this later, BUT please use it from a laptop/desktop and not your phone,) use quality headphones - I can't stress this enough. Headphones of a decent quality are a must. Not earbuds, headphones. Listen to the word MULTIPLE TIMES. Try to copy the accent, play around with the sounds by putting your tongue and your jaw in a different position allowing the sound to vibrate in new parts of your mouth. Try to copy the way they speak, like you're mocking them. This is what babies do.
For the first 6 weeks it's more important that you really assimilate the sounds of the language into your brain. If you only learn 60% as many words as you would have had you not been such a stickler with the sounds and pronunciation, that's fine. You can know every word in the dictionary, but if you don't assimilate the sounds properly in the beginning you wont be able to understand rapid speech even if you could "fluently read" a hypothetical transcript of what was said.
some tips: When you see a new word written, try to always guess it's pronunciation, and then immediately check on http://www.forvo.com to see how differently you sound compared to a pole.
This is not so that you have a native accent, this is so that you understand speech. If you are able to mimic the accent that does not mean that you need to speak like that when talking to people, but when you're alone, and practicing, try to pronounce things as well as possible.
STEP 2 Buy a month long membership to Babbel (https://www.babbel.com/)
Their Polish course has a really really good beginner's program, everything past that is just flashcards, and are not worth the monthly membership. Do these lessons. This should take you anywhere from a month to 3 months depending on your intensity, however you need to spend at least 40 minutes 5 days a week. Not 200 minutes one day a week. That's not how languages work. It's like going to the gym, it needs to become a part of your routine. I always tell people 40 minutes because realistically most people spend 10 minutes logging on, getting their computer, peeing etc. and then only 20 minutes truly studying. You need 30 minutes with only Polish on your mind. If you're the kind of person who can sit down and get right into your workflow immediately, then do 30 minutes, it's your life brah.
I tried like 5 Polish courses and wasted lots of money. Just do Babbel. If you want something more, use the university of Pittsburgh's online Polish course, it's an absolutely perfectly crafted course. here's the link https://lektorek.org/lektorek/firstyear/lessons/
there's no audio, but try to hire a pole to record everything for you, it won't cost more than 50$ probably. I didn't do this, but it's a good idea.
some tips: Don't worry about understanding the theory and all the rules associated with the grammar. DO NOT FORCE YOURSELF TO STUDY GRAMMAR IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO!!!! I cannot stress this enough. You will reach a point in the future where you will want to learn the grammar rules, then learn them. If I tell you something, you wont remember it. But if you ask me for information and I tease you with bits and pieces of it and then finally give it to you, YOU WILL REMEMBER IT. Also, it's entirely possible to speak without using the cases. That's not my style at all, but I have met an American guy living here in Warsaw who says everything in the Nominative Case except if he says a sentence that he learned from someone/heard before, and he's lived and worked here for 11 years, and been in LTRs with Poles who don't speak English. This should NOT be your goal, girls always say he sounds like a child when he speaks, and they do not find it attractive because of that, but if you really just can't grasp the cases, "Przypadki" then don't worry, this guy is doing just fine, so you can do just fine also.
STEP 3a: Start using ANKI flashcard software, and native materials. Find a forum, or a facebook group, or use Kindle and read Harry Potter - it doesn't matter that much: and start reading and listening to things that interest you and most importantly - YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT
Take all of the new sentences, write them down in your little notebook. Use DIKI.PL and http://context.reverso.net/translation/ to look up words and expressions you don't understand. Slavs have their own way of saying things. Often, you'll read something and you'll know every word, but you won't have any idea what the sentence means. This is what "context reverso" is great for. Break down the new sentences or fragments of sentences, and try to make at least one similar sentence, (change a few words,) and truly understand how the sentence works. - not just the meaning, but WHY it has that meaning, how do the cases and the apostrophes, (apostrophes are actually pretty important to pay attention to when reading Polish,) make the sentence mean what it means. Learn how to change it, learn how to play with the langauge. This will make your brain more flexible and allow you to understand things more quickly and intuitively, which is necessary if you're going to have meaningful conversations.
THEN PUT THESE SENTENCES INTO ANKI - and hire someone to record all your sentences when you have like 500 cards. - I currently have a 80% recorded deck with 11,000 flashcards. I cannot overstate how crucial this was for overcoming the intermediate "plateau"
SOME TIPS: This is the most confusing stage, in the sense that you will feel like you have no direction and you will no longer be seeing noticeable improvement on a near daily basis. Trust me: keep grinding. It's like making filling up a bucket with sand, one grain of sand at a time, for 40 minutes a day. In the beginning you see the bucket start to fill with sand, and you can't see the bottom and you think, "I'm making progress!" but then after a while you barely notice a difference. You ARE MAKING PROGRESS - you just don't see it immediately at this stage, this is the reason that so many people stop at this level.
If your motivation becomes weak at this level - TAKE CLASSES I took classes for 4 months, 3 nights a week, and learned nothing in class that I couldn't do on my own, however it made me have to continue studying.
Also, I forgot to mention up above, use https://www.wiktionary.org to look up the different forms of the word; nouns have anywhere from 1-14 different forms depending on their case, and they can be different enough that recognizing them in their other cases is not easy enough that you can understand the new form quickly and automatically enough to understand it when someone is speaking quickly.
STEP 3b: USE iTALKI TO PRACTICE POLISH AT LEAST 2 HOURS A WEEK. I know people will say, "get a girlfriend to practice with" or "get friends to practice with" and obviously this is crucial, but friends and girlfriends aren't going to correct you when you make small mistakes. Polish is a tricky language in the sense that you can speak it super incorrectly and almost everyone understands. Also, in my experience, when you speak confidently and at a normal speed, people don't correct you because they feel awkward doing so. Would you correct you chinese co-worker every time he says something wrong? even if he asks you? the answer is no. It's tiring to grammar patrol someone. You need to pay someone for this. Go on iTalki and ask the teacher for "conversation classes, where we talk about random stuff, and you correct all of my mistakes, even the small ones, through the Skype messaging feature, and if I don't understand a correction or want an elaboration on why it was wrong, I will ask you." Try lessons with at least 3 teachers, even if you think you found "the one." Some teachers are better than others.
HOWEVER, having a social group that will speak with you only in Polish is absolutely amazing, especially if you pay attention and listen to the way the men speak. It's definitely better than iTalki, but if you don't have a teacher iron out all those mistakes, you're never going to speak correctly, and people will think your accent is cute, like a baby.
ALSO, unlike Spanish, Polish does not have many accents. There are differences, slight differences, mainly with word choice, in different parts of the country, but these differences, especially with people under 40, are very small, and in most cases Poles really can't identify where another Pole is from, especially if their both under 40. The father of the family I stayed with spoke with a very distinct sub-carpathian accent, in the sense that every word he said sounded different than the way it's said on TV, but he's almost 70, and most people his age, in his small village, (which is in the middle of nowhere,) don't have a very noticeable accent. I could, however, even with my rudimentary Polish at that time, understand him almost as easily as I understood everyone else. There are "other languages" in Poland, but don't worry about these. Even in Katowice, (this is a city in Silesia, they have their own language there, it's like half German half Polish,) riding on a tram sitting next to two old women speaking in Silesian, they speak Polish. I asked them a stupid question that I knew the answer to, because I was curious if these 80+ ladies spoke Polish, they responded in what was, (to my ears at the time,) perfect Polish, although with a slightly different intonation. To my knowledge, the only place where young people have an accent that's noticeable with nearly every word, is Białystok. Even that accent though, is easy to understand after a few minutes, it just sounds like their singing a bit more when they speak.
STEP 4:
keep doing step 3a and 3b until you die. If you're going to be alive for 50 more years then you might be able to master Polish by the time you die, but maybe not.
STEP 5:
CONSISTENCY IS KEY - DO NOT GET LAZY. It is like bodybuilding, if you take time off, you loose gains. If you speed learn, it is like taking steroids - you need to work extra hard when you stop speed learning to make sure you don't forget more than 20% of what you learned while speed learning.
If you feel fluent, or if you don't want to study anymore but you want to maintain your level in the language, use Polish 2 days a week. Try to do something that really requires concentration, the more intense the review, the shorter it needs to be. You can watch 3 hours of TV, or you can read and analyze a text for 30 minutes once a week, both will have a similar effect.
I wrote this super long and detailed post to give back to the community here, since I've learned a lot of great stuff from this forum, and want to enrich it further, (and since most of you guys love Poland.) One of my sources of income is working as "language learning related stuff" consultant with companies and "business men" in Europe, so this is something I am actually knowledgeable enough about to give honest advice.
My Background:(skip if you just want to read the "how to" part.) I'm from the USA and I'm a "polyglot" I put the word in parenthesis, because I would never actually call myself that, if people ask why I speak so many languages, or how I speak their language with no accent etc. I say I'm a linguist, (which is actually not true, but most people think that means you know a lot of languages.) I actually didn't even study anything language related in College. I speak 6 languages "fluently" and I've learned two of those languages, (as an adult,) to a level where people most of the time think I'm a native speaker. I've studied lots of other languages, and if I had to list the number of languages that I've had a 5minute + conversation with a native in, (not a teacher or tutor etc.) I would add about 5 more to those 6 languages that I speak fluently and use regularly.
So I'm gonna say the sad truth: learning languages takes lots of time, and the faster you learn the faster you forget - so all those random languages I "speed learned" in College etc. I "speed forgot." Keep this in mind when learning a new language. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
11 months ago I moved to Poland. I spent my first month in Łódź, then 6 weeks in the south of Poland living with a family that spoke no English, (I can elaborate on why and how this happened.) and then I moved to Warsaw. Before I came here I knew maybe 20 words, if that.
I'm going to talk about what YOU should do, and then tell you what I did. If I had to do it over again, I would do it a lit bit differently.
Step 1: LEARN THE ALPHABET and the SOUNDS of Polish
Learn how to read a word and pronounce it correctly. This is crucial. If you read a word wrong, and then remember it that way, when a Pole says it to you in conversation, you won't be able to understand them because your mental representation of how the word sounds doesn't align with the way it's being said. Listening comprehension is very difficult in Polish. If you had problems understanding Spanish, you're gonna have a bigger problem understanding spoken Polish. However, if you focus on the right things from the beginning, you won't have a problem down the road.
Here's what I mean, exactly: When you start with Babbel's program, (I'll talk about this later, BUT please use it from a laptop/desktop and not your phone,) use quality headphones - I can't stress this enough. Headphones of a decent quality are a must. Not earbuds, headphones. Listen to the word MULTIPLE TIMES. Try to copy the accent, play around with the sounds by putting your tongue and your jaw in a different position allowing the sound to vibrate in new parts of your mouth. Try to copy the way they speak, like you're mocking them. This is what babies do.
For the first 6 weeks it's more important that you really assimilate the sounds of the language into your brain. If you only learn 60% as many words as you would have had you not been such a stickler with the sounds and pronunciation, that's fine. You can know every word in the dictionary, but if you don't assimilate the sounds properly in the beginning you wont be able to understand rapid speech even if you could "fluently read" a hypothetical transcript of what was said.
some tips: When you see a new word written, try to always guess it's pronunciation, and then immediately check on http://www.forvo.com to see how differently you sound compared to a pole.
This is not so that you have a native accent, this is so that you understand speech. If you are able to mimic the accent that does not mean that you need to speak like that when talking to people, but when you're alone, and practicing, try to pronounce things as well as possible.
STEP 2 Buy a month long membership to Babbel (https://www.babbel.com/)
Their Polish course has a really really good beginner's program, everything past that is just flashcards, and are not worth the monthly membership. Do these lessons. This should take you anywhere from a month to 3 months depending on your intensity, however you need to spend at least 40 minutes 5 days a week. Not 200 minutes one day a week. That's not how languages work. It's like going to the gym, it needs to become a part of your routine. I always tell people 40 minutes because realistically most people spend 10 minutes logging on, getting their computer, peeing etc. and then only 20 minutes truly studying. You need 30 minutes with only Polish on your mind. If you're the kind of person who can sit down and get right into your workflow immediately, then do 30 minutes, it's your life brah.
I tried like 5 Polish courses and wasted lots of money. Just do Babbel. If you want something more, use the university of Pittsburgh's online Polish course, it's an absolutely perfectly crafted course. here's the link https://lektorek.org/lektorek/firstyear/lessons/
there's no audio, but try to hire a pole to record everything for you, it won't cost more than 50$ probably. I didn't do this, but it's a good idea.
some tips: Don't worry about understanding the theory and all the rules associated with the grammar. DO NOT FORCE YOURSELF TO STUDY GRAMMAR IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO!!!! I cannot stress this enough. You will reach a point in the future where you will want to learn the grammar rules, then learn them. If I tell you something, you wont remember it. But if you ask me for information and I tease you with bits and pieces of it and then finally give it to you, YOU WILL REMEMBER IT. Also, it's entirely possible to speak without using the cases. That's not my style at all, but I have met an American guy living here in Warsaw who says everything in the Nominative Case except if he says a sentence that he learned from someone/heard before, and he's lived and worked here for 11 years, and been in LTRs with Poles who don't speak English. This should NOT be your goal, girls always say he sounds like a child when he speaks, and they do not find it attractive because of that, but if you really just can't grasp the cases, "Przypadki" then don't worry, this guy is doing just fine, so you can do just fine also.
STEP 3a: Start using ANKI flashcard software, and native materials. Find a forum, or a facebook group, or use Kindle and read Harry Potter - it doesn't matter that much: and start reading and listening to things that interest you and most importantly - YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT
Take all of the new sentences, write them down in your little notebook. Use DIKI.PL and http://context.reverso.net/translation/ to look up words and expressions you don't understand. Slavs have their own way of saying things. Often, you'll read something and you'll know every word, but you won't have any idea what the sentence means. This is what "context reverso" is great for. Break down the new sentences or fragments of sentences, and try to make at least one similar sentence, (change a few words,) and truly understand how the sentence works. - not just the meaning, but WHY it has that meaning, how do the cases and the apostrophes, (apostrophes are actually pretty important to pay attention to when reading Polish,) make the sentence mean what it means. Learn how to change it, learn how to play with the langauge. This will make your brain more flexible and allow you to understand things more quickly and intuitively, which is necessary if you're going to have meaningful conversations.
THEN PUT THESE SENTENCES INTO ANKI - and hire someone to record all your sentences when you have like 500 cards. - I currently have a 80% recorded deck with 11,000 flashcards. I cannot overstate how crucial this was for overcoming the intermediate "plateau"
SOME TIPS: This is the most confusing stage, in the sense that you will feel like you have no direction and you will no longer be seeing noticeable improvement on a near daily basis. Trust me: keep grinding. It's like making filling up a bucket with sand, one grain of sand at a time, for 40 minutes a day. In the beginning you see the bucket start to fill with sand, and you can't see the bottom and you think, "I'm making progress!" but then after a while you barely notice a difference. You ARE MAKING PROGRESS - you just don't see it immediately at this stage, this is the reason that so many people stop at this level.
If your motivation becomes weak at this level - TAKE CLASSES I took classes for 4 months, 3 nights a week, and learned nothing in class that I couldn't do on my own, however it made me have to continue studying.
Also, I forgot to mention up above, use https://www.wiktionary.org to look up the different forms of the word; nouns have anywhere from 1-14 different forms depending on their case, and they can be different enough that recognizing them in their other cases is not easy enough that you can understand the new form quickly and automatically enough to understand it when someone is speaking quickly.
STEP 3b: USE iTALKI TO PRACTICE POLISH AT LEAST 2 HOURS A WEEK. I know people will say, "get a girlfriend to practice with" or "get friends to practice with" and obviously this is crucial, but friends and girlfriends aren't going to correct you when you make small mistakes. Polish is a tricky language in the sense that you can speak it super incorrectly and almost everyone understands. Also, in my experience, when you speak confidently and at a normal speed, people don't correct you because they feel awkward doing so. Would you correct you chinese co-worker every time he says something wrong? even if he asks you? the answer is no. It's tiring to grammar patrol someone. You need to pay someone for this. Go on iTalki and ask the teacher for "conversation classes, where we talk about random stuff, and you correct all of my mistakes, even the small ones, through the Skype messaging feature, and if I don't understand a correction or want an elaboration on why it was wrong, I will ask you." Try lessons with at least 3 teachers, even if you think you found "the one." Some teachers are better than others.
HOWEVER, having a social group that will speak with you only in Polish is absolutely amazing, especially if you pay attention and listen to the way the men speak. It's definitely better than iTalki, but if you don't have a teacher iron out all those mistakes, you're never going to speak correctly, and people will think your accent is cute, like a baby.
ALSO, unlike Spanish, Polish does not have many accents. There are differences, slight differences, mainly with word choice, in different parts of the country, but these differences, especially with people under 40, are very small, and in most cases Poles really can't identify where another Pole is from, especially if their both under 40. The father of the family I stayed with spoke with a very distinct sub-carpathian accent, in the sense that every word he said sounded different than the way it's said on TV, but he's almost 70, and most people his age, in his small village, (which is in the middle of nowhere,) don't have a very noticeable accent. I could, however, even with my rudimentary Polish at that time, understand him almost as easily as I understood everyone else. There are "other languages" in Poland, but don't worry about these. Even in Katowice, (this is a city in Silesia, they have their own language there, it's like half German half Polish,) riding on a tram sitting next to two old women speaking in Silesian, they speak Polish. I asked them a stupid question that I knew the answer to, because I was curious if these 80+ ladies spoke Polish, they responded in what was, (to my ears at the time,) perfect Polish, although with a slightly different intonation. To my knowledge, the only place where young people have an accent that's noticeable with nearly every word, is Białystok. Even that accent though, is easy to understand after a few minutes, it just sounds like their singing a bit more when they speak.
STEP 4:
keep doing step 3a and 3b until you die. If you're going to be alive for 50 more years then you might be able to master Polish by the time you die, but maybe not.
STEP 5:
CONSISTENCY IS KEY - DO NOT GET LAZY. It is like bodybuilding, if you take time off, you loose gains. If you speed learn, it is like taking steroids - you need to work extra hard when you stop speed learning to make sure you don't forget more than 20% of what you learned while speed learning.
If you feel fluent, or if you don't want to study anymore but you want to maintain your level in the language, use Polish 2 days a week. Try to do something that really requires concentration, the more intense the review, the shorter it needs to be. You can watch 3 hours of TV, or you can read and analyze a text for 30 minutes once a week, both will have a similar effect.
![[Image: suspicious.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/new/suspicious.gif)
. They would say something nice about my American accent and then use that to start the conversation about how they feel towards British men.![[Image: hump.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/new/hump.gif)
, it's really weird that they had something like that. Europe is funny, man)
![[Image: banana.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/new/banana.gif)
![[Image: wink.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/wink.gif)
And, remember: I make tons of mistakes, and my vocabulary is far from "eloquent" I speak like a fluent 12 year old.