My love for Polish women has pushed me into learning the language. It’s mostly unnecessary, since the majority of Polish women under 30 years old speak English, but I want to have access to all Polish women. Besides, I also want to master a Slavic language. Here are the four Polish resources you should study first:
1. Pimsleur Comprehensive Polish. This audio course has 30 lessons (one unit) that gives you a basic understanding of getting around and meeting people in Polish. Pimsleur really is the gold standard in learning instruction as they chop up hard languages into pieces that you memorize with just average effort.
2. Polish Pod 101. Pretty good online course that costs about $10 a month. I did all 60 audio lessons of their Survival course that complimented the Pimsleur course. Since the lesson transcripts are available in PDF, I was able to turn create a lot of useful flash cards.
3. Michel Thomas Polish. Affordable audio program that builds off the above two resources. My only complaint is that the level of difficulty jumps quite a bit from each CD instead of building slowly upon each other like with Pimsleur. Nonetheless, it was extremely helpful and answered a lot of grammar questions that Pimsleur doesn’t address.
4. Polish In A Nutshell PDF. This is a free grammar book with lots of vocabulary and sample sentence. I think the book fails as a teaching guide because of its density, but it’s short enough that you don’t have to spend a lot of time extracting the information you need.
If you study the above four carefully, you should have a Polish vocabulary of at around 750 words and phrases. This is strong enough to have very basic conversations in Polish while understanding bits of pieces of what is said to you. Your grammar will be atrocious but Polish people are very forgiving of your mistakes. At this point there are two things you can try:
5. Polish In 4 Weeks. This is a great textbook that starts to test your knowledge with written exercises. It will likely take you longer than four weeks to complete.
6. Private Teacher. It’s time to get some live speaking practice done with a Polish native. If you’re not in Poland, you can hire a teacher online via Italki or Fiverr. Or you can do a language exchange on Live Mocha.
Here are some additional free tools that will help:
- Forvo. Over 20,000 Polish words pronounced.
- Word Reference. Great Polish-English dictionary.
- Polish Verb Conjugator. Weird search engine but you’ll get conjugations for all major verbs.
I gave you enough that you should be busy for about 4-6 months at two hours a day, assuming you also use a flash card program (I use Anki). Polish is not easy but if your long-term romantic goals involve Polish women, I believe it’s worth it. Powodzenia!
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I’m a polish guy. The best method as with every language: listen listen listen talk talk talk.
The more, the better. Grammar is so complicated its pointless and masochistic to learn it from book or audiobook. You have to get used to whole phrases…
Also there is little logic in polish language rules. Reminds me girls thinking process;-)
You have to go with the flow, Just use it as it is.
I’m super curious what would you think about polish girls after 3 or 6 months of “LTR” :)))
Hello Roosh,
I would also recommend Assimil Courses. They are also good. I learned a good amount of Russian with it when I was 15, 16. I suppose the Polish equivalents are also that good. I recommended it also on In Mala Fide when it was still online.
Greetings
So Assimil is a CD with a textbook? Seems cheap on Amazon, about $20.
Exactly, a textbook with a CD. Check out the Wiki page about it. I don’t know how much it does cost. I paid then for the Russian textbook only about 40 Deutsche Mark, well roughly 20 Euro.
It’s a good book, exspecially if you live in the coutry.
20 bucks will probably only get you the book, not the cd’s, which is kind of useless. I paid 75 euros for the assimil czech course, which consists of the book and 4 audiocd’s
Especially with a difficult language like Polish, it makes sense to spend a lot of time with resources like Pimsleur and Assimil to pick up the basics.
To push yourself to the next level, though, consider a period of total immersion. Spend a few weeks cut off from English; no books, no internet, no movies, no calls back home.
Living on a farm with no internet, or in a Polish city without his computer, insisting that every conversation stay 100% Polish even if her English is better than his Polish– that might not be very practical for Roosh, or for most people– but if you’re ready to make a long-term investment, it’s something to consider.
Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s impractical, but that’s what worked for me (in French).
Roos, have you checked out fluentin3months.com…the guy has a hacking languages guide, which is apparently extremely good
I learned Polish as a child but only spoke it with my parents and grandparents. While my Polish is good, it’s still not where I want it to be. What’s helped me improve it tremendously is dating Polish women. Unless you live in Poland, Chicago or the UK this may be difficult but it’s the best “system” I’ve found. Definitely use books, courses, tutors, etc. but the greatest motivation for me is better communication with the women. I’ve dated some cool girls that know English well too so they help me with vocabulary and grammar and vice versa. Probably the best variant of this has been day game on Polish women who speak no English. It gives me a very concrete and practical application for what I’ve been learning. It’s a tough language, but if you have Polish roots or a strong interest in Poland, it’s worth it.
Totally agree with you Nick. I also learned Polish as a kid and even went to Polish school here in melbourne in my early teens. Of course then i decided i didn`t want to learn it anymore because i preferred to play sports!!! Big regret there. Anyway, it is a tough language to grasp. I think being totally immersed in it is the way to go. Try and find a Polish native via the net and get them to help you out. I`ve been to Poland a few times for vacations and found that it all started coming back to me the longer i was there. I always understood more than i could speak it.
All hope is not lost – did a refresher course a couple of years back at a local college for non speakers. There was was this wonderful South African woman who couldn`t speak a word, but after a few months she was speaking it very well.
I find Polish verbs fairly straight forward at least compared to Russian and other languages. Even their nouns are more regular. It can be time consuming memorizing all the forms and learn how use it.
Using the right form is more of the problem especially with cases combined with prepositions.
Again best way is practice speaking and talking.
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Roosh, this is autogen spam.
Polish/Ukrainian/English native speaker (and ivy league trained linguist) here and I’ve only heard 2 anglophone people who have mastered Polish at a near native level – historian Norman Davies and journalist Anna Applebaum. That said, any improvement will definitely boost quality of life in Poland. I didn’t realize how few people spoke English well (especially older folks you’ll be forced to deal with like bureaucrats and landlords) until my American husband tried getting around on his own.
At any rate, 100% agree with full immersion and as much contact with natives as possible. I probably have time for at least 1-2 hours a week of practice if you’re interested. I also have some hot cousins in Poland (and moving there soon), but that’s another matter. 😛