Customer Reviews

Hugo Language Course: Polish In Three Months

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I've been searching a long time for a book that could effectively teach both pronunciation and grammar, and this still isn't it.

On the one hand, the tapes are very effective for getting the sound of the words 'in your ear,' and you find that you can soon say 'krzyczysz' without stuttering. : ) The book is also helpful for verbs, although it does run through them very quickly.

On the other hand, the British way (I assume) of handling the declining of nouns (and pronouns and adjectives, etc. for that matter) is very disorienting in the way it teaches a seventh of single noun at a time. It would be a lot easier if they would explain all seven cases right at the beginning instead of 'all right, this month you'll learn 'I...' , next month you'll learn '...like...', and the month after that: '...chicken.' What's the use of learning 'he' when you don't learn 'him'? This makes learning a single word excruciatingly frustrating, impeding memorization, while easily making errors.

On the whole, though, I'd say it is worthwhile as a starting point for getting a sense of the layout of the language.

I was very disappointed in this course. I bought the course because it had both a book and an audio component. AUDIO: The tapes start off with an excellent section on pronunciation, but soon they're just saying unrelated sentences without any translation. The tapes are completely unsuited for use without the book. There are several long conversations that are useful for practice in listening, but they are not really intended to help you speak better. The narrator's British accent and idioms are very distracting for an American, not to mention that she starts each lesson with a condescending lecture. That approach will not go down well with Americans, either. The BOOK: The book is fairly good for initially learning the grammar, although it gets terribly bogged down very early on with learning the numbers. Each chapter has written exercises which were helpful. The book is not good as a reference due to the weak index and the fact that topics such as prepositions are sprinkled throughout the book.

it seems a very good book if you want to learn polhish quickly... Nice ilustrations...