Simple Language Learning - Learn Polish: A Comprehensive Guide to Learning Polish for Beginners, Including Grammar, Short Stories and 1000 Popular Phrases

Knowing another language has recently become one of the most valuable skills to have, and not only in the job market. Due to the globalization and the fast development of technology, the whole world has become an interconnected web. Today, we work in multinational companies, take part in international webinars, and travel to the most beautiful places in the world. No one can imagine going abroad without knowing a tiny bit of English or the local language. Thus, the decision to learn a foreign language, especially an exotic one, seems to be one of the best investments you can make. Plus, the investment can be made without huge sums of moneyas long as you stick to affordable yet reliable and informative sources (like this book!).

Your decision to learn a foreign language is a bit more specificas you decided to learn Polish. However, whatever your motivation for doing so, you wont be disappointed. Before you immerse yourself in learning, lets get familiarized with some basic information about both the country of Poland and the Polish language. The country of Poland has existed since 966 ADthe year of declaring Christianity as a national religion by the first Polish king. Poland is located in Central Europe and shares its borders with Germany on the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the south and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and a bit of Russia on the east. In the north, it has access to the Baltic Sea (around 400 km of the coastline).

Polish is certainly not one of the most spoken languages in the worldsince it is the official language of Poland exclusively. It has around 38 million speakers in Poland, but many immigrants in countries such as the USA, UK, Germany, Norway, and Ireland are Polish. The Polish Community Abroad includes, for example, more than one million Poles in the UK and nearly one million in the States. What is also interesting is that many Americans are of Polish origindue to the mass emigration caused by the difficult political situation in Poland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many native speakers of English consider Polish (along with Chinese, Arabic and Japanese) as one of the hardest languages to learn due to its heavy inflectional system and, probably, pronunciation. It may be partially true; however, the beginning is always the toughest part of any language journey, yet speaking one of the hardest languages in the world is quite an achievement.

Polish is a Slavic language, yet its written form is not based on the Cyrillic alphabet but the Latin script. Therefore, the Polish sounds can be tough to learn, especially some unusual consonant clusters like szcz or dd . However, the more you practice the pronunciation, the more automatic it becomes. Furthermore, the beginning is always the hardest part of any language journey since your first language data interferes with the new data that comes into your mind. This book will teach you the vocabulary and grammar basics, along with some cultural background. With just fifteen-twenty minutes of practice a day, you will be able to have a decent conversation in the target language, and your use of Polish will improve.

Now lets take a look at some features of Polish that English speakers might find unusual and are not familiar with:

• The Polish language contains seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, and vocative). The cases might make the process of learning a little overwhelming at the beginning, but theres nothing to be afraid of.
• The Polish gender system is very different from the English onesince gender in Polish is grammatical, whereas it is biological in English. For instance, the Polish word st [table] is masculine, ksika [book] is feminine, and jajko [egg] is neutral.
• Polish is a highly inflectional language it means that nouns, verbs and other parts of speech can have different endings or prefixes, depending on the case, gender, number, tense, and other features.
• Due to the abundance of inflections, Polish sentences can be created in multiple ways. Unlike English, Polish does not require a fixed order (such as subject + verb + object). Although there are more popular patterns, you can place each word in a sentence randomly, and it will be grammatically correct (of course, there are some minor exceptions).
• All Polish womens first names end with the vowel a, except for the ones with foreign origin.
• Polish shares many grammatical and lexical features with the other Slavic languages, such as Czech or Slovak.
• Because of the influence of the inflectional system, Polish people add inflections to foreign names. For instance, you can notice different suffixes added to Harry Potter or Spiderman in different cases (like Harrego Pottera, Spidermana, Harremu Potterowi, Spidermanowi, etc.).
• There are only three grammatical tenses in Polishpast, future, and present.

  The rules of forming tenses are quite different toosince tenses are created by adding a suffix or a prefix in most cases.

• Polish people put a lot of stress on formal forms of address. It is highly advisable to address a person you dont know or your boss/teacher with a word Pan/Pani instead of just you . Addressing someone by using the you form in situations like a job interview or a formal meeting is considered rude.