My love for Polish women has pushed me into learning the language. It’s mostly unnecessary, since the majority of Polish women under 30 years old speak English, but I want to have access to all Polish women. Besides, I also want to master a Slavic language. Here are the four Polish resources you should study first:
1. Pimsleur Comprehensive Polish. This audio course has 30 lessons (one unit) that gives you a basic understanding of getting around and meeting people in Polish. Pimsleur really is the gold standard in learning instruction as they chop up hard languages into pieces that you memorize with just average effort.
2. Polish Pod 101. Pretty good online course that costs about $10 a month. I did all 60 audio lessons of their Survival course that complimented the Pimsleur course. Since the lesson transcripts are available in PDF, I was able to turn create a lot of useful flash cards.
3. Michel Thomas Polish. Affordable audio program that builds off the above two resources. My only complaint is that the level of difficulty jumps quite a bit from each CD instead of building slowly upon each other like with Pimsleur. Nonetheless, it was extremely helpful and answered a lot of grammar questions that Pimsleur doesn’t address.
4. Polish In A Nutshell PDF. This is a free grammar book with lots of vocabulary and sample sentence. I think the book fails as a teaching guide because of its density, but it’s short enough that you don’t have to spend a lot of time extracting the information you need.
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If you study the above four carefully, you should have a Polish vocabulary of at around 750 words and phrases. This is strong enough to have very basic conversations in Polish while understanding bits of pieces of what is said to you. Your grammar will be atrocious but Polish people are very forgiving of your mistakes. At this point there are two things you can try:
5. Polish In 4 Weeks. This is a great textbook that starts to test your knowledge with written exercises. It will likely take you longer than four weeks to complete.
6. Private Teacher. It’s time to get some live speaking practice done with a Polish native. If you’re not in Poland, you can hire a teacher online via Italki or Fiverr. Or you can do a language exchange on Live Mocha.
Here are some additional free tools that will help:
- Forvo. Over 20,000 Polish words pronounced.
- Word Reference. Great Polish-English dictionary.
- Polish Verb Conjugator. Weird search engine but you’ll get conjugations for all major verbs.
I gave you enough that you should be busy for about 4-6 months at two hours a day, assuming you also use a flash card program (I use Anki). Polish is not easy but if your long-term romantic goals involve Polish women, I believe it’s worth it. Powodzenia!
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