After more than three and half hours, I have managed to learn quite a few hundred words that I had to memorize or that were pending for review. As I said, I use jmemorize to make vocabulary flashcards and I repeat each card till they are in the third batch.
In the last few days, I have read and memorized the vocabulary of most of the lessons of my textbook, “First year polish“. I am now finishing lesson eleven.
I have also read a couple of articles from Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzechpospolita. I undestand them with difficulties. I can also read the headlines and try to grasp the sense of some articles without using the dictionary.
Finally, and this is something I am very excited about, I am reading a bilingual (Polish and Russian) edition of Wszystko Czerwone, by the great Polish novelist Joanna Chmielewska.
I am delighted that I have found such an interesting and easy to read novel. I found it at Ilia Frank’s web page, where I also found other novels in Polish and Russian that seem to be a bit more difficult to read.
The Ilia Frank method looks a bit confusing sometimes. But in this edition, Russian explanations are written in green characters, so you can easily skip them if you understand the polish text. I don’t think that reading parallel texts should be used as a stand alone method, but is a wonderful additional activity.
I have learned 1.800 words so far. My primary goal is to learn 3000 words in the next few days. We will see how much I will be able to understand by that time.
Once I am done with my textbook, I will focus on listening to the dialogs and memorizing them.
