Polish is a West Slavic language, which is *spoken by approximately 50 million people* worldwide. Besides of Poland, there are large polish speaking communities in Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Great Britain, the Ukraine, the USA and Russia. After Russian, Polish is the *second most spoken slavic language in the world*.
Due to the slavic roots of Polish language, most *Polish words* can not be derived from central european languages. Polish *loan words* originate from Latin, Greek, Middle High German, Old Czech, in younger history from English, French, German, Ukrainian, Belarussian and Turkish languages. Four years later, in 2011, famed polyglot and friend Richard Simcott had invited me to spend a couple of days with him in Poznan, a city in western Poland. I was thrilled to join him and hang out in Poland for a while. A few days prior, Richard had made friends with Michal, a Polish polyglot who had recognized Richard off the street from his YouTube videos. The three of us spent a lot of time together in those short few days. We had a lot of fun, and I was very happy to have more time to spend in Poland, enjoying the company of Richard and several new Polish friends. During my stay in Poznan, I got a better idea of the language and the country. I loved observing how Richard interacted with the Polish people he met. So much so, in fact, that upon my return to Rome, learning Polish was on my language learning priority list. Knowing a language within one family can greatly boost understanding of the mechanisms of a different language within that same family. Polish and Russian share a good deal of vocabulary, a similar syntax, and a comparable case system. In these areas, having previous knowledge of Russian was invaluable. The truth is that Russian and Polish remain two different languages. The first time I was in Krakow back in 2007, I used Russian as a substitute for Polish, especially during brief interactions in shops. Or at least I tried to! There is good news, though. Despite the mess of consonants, Polish is spoken as it is written. If you understand the Polish sound system and know how to read written Polish, then spelling is quite straightforward. Back in 2012, I began doing Skype-based language exchanges with Joanna, a Polish girl I had met through the language learning community. She would help me with my Polish, and I would help her with her Spanish. It was a live show, so I can remember being quite nervous. However, I managed to keep it together despite all that, and in the end the experience gave me a huge confidence boost. If I could survive a live interview in Polish, I knew I could weather anything else that the language could throw at me. I was in Warsaw this time, working with Konrad Jerzak vel Dobosz, who is a well-known Polish polyglot. We were writing a book called Jak uczyć się językw which would be released the following year. Luckily, the dentist managed to solve my toothache relatively quickly. Even better, I was so impressed with the treatment I received, that I quickly decided that this random Polish dentist would become my main dentist, despite the fact that I live over a thousand kilometers away in Rome, Italy! This is not a language I want to know only a little bit. I want to live and breathe the Polish language and culture, and use it for the rest of my life. I want to experience all I can of Poland, its people, its traditions, and its essence. The way Poland and Polish people make me feel has created a long-lasting, concrete, burning desire to explore the language, the culture and its people that is only growing with time. Wow, this was a great website for me. I do not speak Polish, but would like to. My wife is Polish and she wanted our children to speak Polish. My wife though had difficulty with actually working to achieve her desired future of Polish/bilingual children, so her idea was when our children were born she would speak to them in Polish and myself in English (American English) and they would instinctively learn both languages without any effort on her part. I personally have lived in Poznan and Krakow, which is where I met my wife. We have friends in Poland and unfortunately only infrequently visit there. I found this website looking for in person courses that my son might enter to further this. Thanks for this story, I find it fascinating and inspiring. Looking for an online Polish tutor? Preply is the leading online language learning platform worldwide. You can choose from 281 Polish teachers with an average rating of 4.95 out of 5 stars given by 3607 customers. Book a lesson with a private Polish teacher today and start learning. Not entirely happy with your tutor? No worries, Preply offers free tutor replacement till you're 100% satisfied. Looking for a different way to learn a language? Explore online Polish classes.Read moreGet a personalized choice of tutors by answering a few quick questions Hello there! We take your privacy seriously, and want to be as transparent as possible. So: We (and our partners) use cookies to collect some personal data from you. Some of these cookies we absolutely need in order to make things work, and others you can choose in order to optimize your experience while using our site and services. It's up to you! Additionally, we and our advertising partners store and/or access information on your device and also process personal data, like unique identifiers, browsing activity, and other standard information sent by your device including your IP address. This information is collected over time and used for personalized ads, ad measurement, audience insights, and product development specific to our ads program. If this sounds good to you, select \"I Agree!\" below. Otherwise, you can get more information, customize your consent preferences, or decline consent by selecting \"Learn More\". Note that your preferences apply only to Tumblr. If you change your mind in the future you can update your preferences any time by using the Privacy link beneath each ad. One last thing: Some of your data may be processed by our advertising partners based on legitimate interests instead of consent, but you can object to that by choosing \"Learn More\" and then disabling the Legitimate Interests toggle under any listed Purpose or Partner on their respective settings pages. To that person wanting to learn Polish: look for a tandem partner, too. I am not sure whether this is a thing in your country, but in Germany there are numerous tandem FB groups and it's really helpful for language learners. What you basically do is ask for help in a language and in return you can offer help in another language, if possible. I've just joined the kik group chat and it would really be nice if there were more people because I live in south FL so there aren't too many Polish people I could make friends with haha. Do you think you could join too? 'Ś' shounds like 'sh' and 'sz' sounds more like the 's' version of 'cz'? Does that make sense? I think that's the best I can explain it. :-P (You said you couldn't tell the two apart in soun so I thought I might try ) For the person who says they're fully polish, they should ask their parents to speak polish in front of them because that's the best way to immerse yourself and learn quicker. My parents don't speak English to me to help me practice always Hi! I really want to learn Polish, but am struggling to know where to even begin. My boyfriend's parents, like yours from what I've read in your 'about me", immigrated from Poland and had him here in America. He grew up speaking Polish and learned English at a young age. He is very little help because he doesn't realize how tricky the language is. Any advice? Thanks! About that anon who asked about Polish, Russian & Ukrainian: my friend studies Ukrainian & Polish at Uni and she has confirmed this many times that Ukrainian sounds much more like Polish than Russian. In 2016, I moved to Poland to make it my new home. Initially, I thought I would get by with only using English, because I worked as a consultant and had visited Poland many times. English had been more than enough when I stayed in a hotel or worked in an international company. At one Christmas dinner, I felt desperate while sitting and looking at people laughing, talking and making jokes that I could not understand. This is when I decided: I have to learn Polish. I will spend the next year studying it. After the class ended, I remembered how I had studied English at school. My father would give me a card with the list of all irregular verb forms and I would memorize it in one day. I would fix this card on the wall and look at it every day. As a result, my English improved a lot. So, I thought why not do the same with Polish? This gave me the flexibility to learn anytime and anywhere. I went on our app Globott to work with the flashcards. Whenever I had a 5 minute break from work. I listened to the Polish sentences on flashcards, and I tried to translate them to English. I worked with the flashcards regularly before going to bed. Eventually, a funny thing happened: I stopped looking at my social media in the evening and instead I would learn Polish. Sometimes, we get scared by the difficult grammar concepts, but if we get exposure to the language, our brain knows what to do. It analyzes the patterns, learns them and tries to repeat them whenever it comes to speaking. I was doing better and better, so as a next step, I decided to tackle the State Polish B1 exam. I read so many stories about it. Some people said it was impossible to pass, especially for someone whose mother tongue is not Slavic. Preparing for an exam is a bit different. There are many elements you have to tackle. I was not so confident in written Polish, so I joined group classes that helped with the technical aspects of the exam. My husband suggested I should start writing short texts using simple sentences. This way it was much easier to find the right word and form. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "beets" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beets-users/7416344d-d94b-4db0-8f41-ab689184dda5n%40googlegroups.com.
