Customer Reviews

First Year Polish

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

 

 

I worked through this book from cover to cover before a trip to Poland several years ago. The vocabulary is colloquial and current. The book turned out to be an excellent preparation for my trip. I found that I could make myself understood in most everyday situations.

I found First Year Polish to be so useful, that I bought Intermediate Polish...also and excellent book.

I had the pleasure of studying under Dr. Swan, the author of this book. He has a new version of this book for every single semester of classes, but they aren't officially published versions. He used to have the print center make course guides, but now (for the first year book) he has put the book online at http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/. It's always his most up-to-date version. Also, instead of doing the drills at the end of the chapter on paper, he has a free computer program called Lektorek. It tells you when you are wrong so that you don't learn something incorrectly. It's sort of buggy sometimes, but for the most part it's much easier to learn Polish with this program. Another advantage to the online version of the book is that you can click on the drills that you'll have to do in the Lektorek, and it will pronounce it for you. The conversations border on the surreal, but all in all, I did learn a lot from the Lektorek and online pronounciation.

This was a very useful book for learning Polish. I lived in Poland for a year and a half. This book was one of the things that helped me become fairly fluent in this hard language. I also reccomend the the Intermidiate Polish by Swan.

This book is outdated and it uses an old style of language teaching. However, it is a good book to start learning Polish. The vocabulary and the expressions used throughout the book are very useful, and in no time you will be able to say many things in Polish.
The exercises can be repetitive and sometimes boring, but they do help you reaffirm the grammar you have learnt in each lesson.

If you are looking for a more up-to-date version of this book, it is available online and free of charge. You can also purchase an audio CD for the online version this book.

It's hard to find good materials for teaching Polish. This book has the advantage of being simple, clear, and inexpensive. The method of teaching is traditional. It will give you a good foundation in grammar.

This textbook is perhaps one of the best due to it's handling of the grammar of the Polish language. As anyone who has tried to learn Polish can tell you, Polish has a high degree of variance in the inflection and tense systems of the nouns and verbs. Thus you either need to do a lot of memorization of noun and verb forms (like in Spoken World: Polish), or you have a ton of grammar to learn. This book doesn't fully explain every single grammar variance, but it does give quite a lot. For more see: Intermediate Polish or Grammar of Contemporary Polish, both by O. Swan.

All in all this is a great introduction to the grammar of the Polish language. Some have stated that the book is outdated. It might be due to it's drills and such, but the language is not outdated really. And the text is set up in your typical language textbook fashion. It has either a few short dialogues or a reading text (sometimes both), and then vocabulary and grammar explanations. It then gives a set of drills and exercises. The only downsides are hard to find audio tapes (which can be found, but not easily, though they are still in print) and no answer key for the exercises.