How did it all start?

The point of this blog is to practice my Polish and to track the progress I make, but since I am still at a very early stage, I will write some notes in English.

I started studying Polish about six days ago. I was waiting for the results of an important exam and since I had nothing urgent to do I decided to go to a bookstore to look for some books to learn a new foreign language. That language could be Polish or Portuguese.

I did not find anything interesting, but when I came back home I found First Year Polish, a marvelous textbook available for free online with sound recordings. When I saw it, I knew I could not miss this opportunity to start learning the language. I am specially grateful to the author of this textbook for his enormous help to us language learners.

Why did I chose Polish? Basically, because I speak Russian.

I badly wanted to start learning a new language. Portuguese would be relatively easy. I like the language very much. I read Portuguese newspapers every time I have a chance and listen to the radio in Portuguese. I also have a nice Portuguese grammar for foreigners. I would really like to learn Portuguese in the long run and I hope I will have the time and patience to practice it regularly.

Polish would obviously be much harder, but I thought that knowledge of Russian would be helpful. And it has helped so far. There are many false friends, but it is easy to learn vocabulary if the root of the words sound familiar to you. The grammar structure is very similar. I know they belong to different subgroups within the family of Slavonic languages, but they seem to be closely related.

I am an experienced language learner. I speak English, French, German, Russian and Estonian. I learned most of the Estonian I know by studying on my own. I know Polish is by all measures a difficult language, but for this purposes I consider a “hard language” something like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew or Hungarian. I would only start learning those languages if I had the time, the money and the security that I would be able to continue my studies for an extended period of time.

So, what have I done so far? In the last six days I have studied the first six lessons of First Year Polish. I have done the exercises and memorized the vocabulary in order to have a passive knowledge of a large number of words. I have learned 1000 words using Jmemorize, a wonderful open source tool to make flashcards.

My experience as a language learner says that to get around in a foreign language you need about 3000 words (obviously, this is not the only thing you need to do in order to be fluent). I will see how long it takes this time to be able to read the press and listen to some easy radio programs. Last year I learned about 7000 words in Estonian and now I am able to read and understand most texts. Literary texts still pose problems though.

I prefer to acquire a passive knowledge of the language first and only later I will try to speak or to learn important expressions or grammar rules. For instance, I did not bother to learn case endings by heart. They are quite similar to Russian and they are easy to recognize.

I have also read the first 5 or 6 stories provided as complementary material at the webpage of the University of Pittsburg were I found the textbook. They are very lovely stories about “Krystyna, Pawel, i Reks”.

Basically what I know now is just a bunch of words, and some of the basic grammar structures. Today I would like to read with a dictionary one easy newspaper article to see how much I am able to understand. Then I will go back to review my vocabulary list and to read more about Krystyna. It is a pity that there are only sound recordings for the first five chapters!