My polish after 6 months

It’s been more than six months since I started learning Polish in December. I have definitely made some improvements, but I could not devote to Polish as much time as I would have liked.

Vocabulary

Last year, as I was learning Estonian, I learned about 50 words a day every day. Now I have not learned more than 500 words in 6 months. In contrast, my vocabulary list in Estonian had about 5000 words when I judged my vocabulary was broad enough.

Reading

I have been reading Polish press articles from Gazeta Wyborcza from time to time. I am now more able to grasp the general sense of what I am reading. I read faster. Sometimes I understand all the useful information. Sometimes I don’t.

Here is a random text from the first site of Gazeta Wyborcza:

Negocjacje z USA w sprawie tarczy coraz bardziej nerwowe. Prezydent Kaczyński odwołał orędzie. Amerykanie uważają, że premier Tusk naprawdę tarczy nie chce.

In understand everything but the sentence “Kaczyński odwołał orędzie.” He refused to give a speech? He canceled his scheduled speech? So, as you see, I get the general meaning.

I tried to find some article which I could not understand. Generally, this leader by Adam Michnik is hard to understand, even though I understand many different parts from the text.

Zła przeszłość i psy gończe, czyli odpieprzcie się od Wałęsy

What does the title mean? A bad past and a dog is running after someone, or running away from Wałesa? I need to use my dictionary. And it does’t help much. As a general rule, opinion articles are always harder to read.

I have not been reading quite regularly Wszystko czerwone. Partly because of lack of time.

Listening comprehension

Here is where I have mad the most progress. A month ago I got a new satellite dish and a new tv in my room where I could watch Polish tv any time. I watch it at least a few minutes every day. I get TVP, TVP Kultura, TVP Historia y TVP Info. Sometimes I understand most of it, sometimes nothing and sometimes part of it. But I am generally able to understand quite a lot, and that is a big improvement because at first I could hardly recognize any word in spoken Polish.

Speaking and writing

Here is where I have made no improvement at all. I don’t have the time or the occasion to try to speak or to write anything. Polish grammar remains a mystery for me. I understand all of the endings because they are similar to Russian endings, but I did not learned them well enough to be able to write a decent sentence in Polish.

Basically, I am happy with what I have learned because I think there is no turning point back. Whenever I have more time to learn the language, I will make more progress. As long as I keep reading and watching Polish television, my level will improve. My level of understanding is enough to keep me interested and motivated.

Probably the best thing I could do now is to learn more vocabulary (with jmemorize, a free and open source flashcard learning tool) every day. This proved amazingly useful when I was learning Estonian.

Stan wojenny

It seemed to me yesterday that the vocabulary I am getting from Wszystko Czerwone is far too complicated. The dialogs are simple, but descriptions contain many infrequent words. So I decided to read more the press in order to expand my vocabulary with the most useful words.

Yesterday I read a lot of articles from Rzechpospolita. Today I have read quite a few articles from Gazeta Wyborcza. This one was particulary nice - it was very easy to read!

Polish tv online

Even though I can watch quite a few interesting Polish channels at home, my satellite dish is almost 20 years old and the signal disappears every once in a while. Luckily for me, you can also watch many Polish tv programs over the internet.

Basically, you can watch news on demand from TVP. It is quite a good exercise after reading a few articles Rzechpospolita or Gazeta Wyborcza. The signal is flawless. My internet connection is not as fast as it should be and it seems to slow down when my brother is downloading stuff from his laptop, but I have not had any problems so far. And the image quality is excellent.

You can also watch many other tv programs on demand. Most interestingly, you can see many channels live. I have watched a couple of programs in TVP Kultura. It is quite exciting when you pick some of the words or grasp the general sense of what they are talking about.

What I have learned in the last few days

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.

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!