Customer Reviews

Colloquial Polish: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been learning Polish for almost two years, but most of the courses I've gone through have been keeping the vocabulary and grammar below the intermediate level and not going beyond that point. Of all the courses I've gotten so far, this is the absolute best. It keeps the language at a level of simplicity that almost everybody who uses it will be able to understand. If you have a sufficient knowledge of how Polish pronunciation works, you might be able to use just the book only. If you don't know the sounds of Polish or are unsure about certain sounds, I'd recommend getting the cassettes that accompany the textbook. (I already had some cassettes for Polish when I bought this course, and I also have a Polish friend who helps me with speaking the language, so I didn't buy the cassettes and can't tell you about their content.) The pronunciation, though at times difficult to enunciate clearly and often frustrating to those who aren't used to the frequent combinations of consonants, is mercifully straightforward and has few exceptions. Once you know how Polish pronunciation works, you can read Polish right off a page. The books details the common exceptions (very few words are read differently than they're spelt orthographically. One tense has a switch of stress, from the penultimate to the antepenultimate), and the grammar is explained clearly. It speaks from a "native-English" point of view so that all native speakers of English can relate the information through the idioms and logic they naturally use. Overall, this is the best book you can buy for learning how to both write and speak Polish. Speaking what you read or hear is the absolute best way to keep your knowledge fresh in your memory. Langenscheidt offers an awesome dictionary which can be used to further your Polish after completing the course. With this dictionary and the course, you should be able to converse with Poles is a short time.

This book is light-years better than many of the so-called conversational methods around, such as Pimsleur -- which repeats so often and goes so slowly that one loses all interest -- and unlike those books, it actually teaches grammar, but in a logical order. I have no idea what "Hello Kitty" reviewer could possibly be criticizing: how can one learn a language without learning grammar? (I am a language teacher myself and have taught myself several languages with textbooks. Good language students want to learn grammar!) If one wants actually to understand what one is learning, so that one can freely produce the language oneself rather than mechanically repeating phrases, this is the way to go. It is indeed a book for beginners, but beginners who think, not parrots (which is what many other language tapes are designed for).

I've been studying Polish for about a year and a half and have gotten to an intermediate proficiency with this book as the keystone of my studying. I have supplemented my use of this book with a couple of other courses when I reached a point where I felt I needed more work on real-time hearing skills or what-have-you. Anyway, this course/book has a very orderly progression both in vocabulary and sentence complexity that builds on past lessons while supplementing them. Proper focus/emphasis is given to the key noun/adjective cases in Polish that are most predominant.

It should be noted that this book definitely goes beyond a course for "beginners" in my opinion. It introduces all 7 cases, both perfective and imperfective verb aspect and all verb tenses in Polish. In other words, it lays the essential groundwork for the language. When you've completed the book (if you've really mastered it), you'll know how to express yourself in Polish in all but rather complex conversations.

Learning Polish pronunciation is so difficult for English speakers that I would not recommend even attempting it without either audio soundtracks or a teacher. This book has both as it is used by language schools such as Multilingual Chicago and has a two CD set which you can listen to while driving, making great use of otherwise wasted time. This introductory level book wisely defers some of the most difficult grammatical detail for later, concentrating instead on giving the learner a basic working grasp of the language spoken on the streets today (which, believe me, is no small accomplishment if you haven't had past exposure to Slavic languages). My only complaint is that it is not yet available in a combined audio print set for Kindle (nor does Amazon even have a single Polish/English dictionary available on Kindle yet).

This book is ok if you're a tourist wanting to learn some quick phrases or if you have a prior knowledge of the polish language, but if you actually want to learn and understand the language then this book is not for you. It starts off with a dialogue, but they don't tell you the meaning of any of the words. It tells you a phrase and has it's english equivalent, it may be used the same way but if you look up the words in a dictionary, not a single word is the same as in the english equivalent. I like to be told what it really means. Plus the layout of the book is confusing and takes some getting used to. Overall this book was not worth the money.

In short, I have used 3 books in the Routledge series (Polish, Slovak, and Czech) and they are all fairly good - not great. A four star choice for $30.

The Polish book was a very helpful beginning for me with the language. For less time and money than it takes to drive to one college class, you can learn a great deal.

Many people, including me, find that Routledge does not organize these books particularly well. e.g. The index is so-so and does not provide page references - only chapter references; however the chapter numbers are not printed on each page, so it becomes a bit of a treasure hunt each time one wishes to find a topic e.g. superlatives, perfect tense.

I have taken 3 non-credit Polish language courses and found this book to be quite hard. It starts out teaching a lot of grammar rules, like how to change the endings on verbs, rather than starting with easy words to learn. Each chapter includes a couple short dialogues (only the 1st 8 chapters includes an English translation of them) and then lists some words to learn. Since it is so difficult, and throws you into sentence structure a real Polish person would use, you can pick up a few things but you cannot expect to just read through a chapter and understand everything. I think this book is much too hard for someone who knows no Polish or for someone just traveling to Poland for business/pleasure, even though the book jacket says it was written with these people in mind. It is more of an intermediate college-level course. I do love its word lists in the back, though. It has Polish words with quick English meanings and vice versa. It may be worth the price just for these word lists (I love memorizing new words!).