Is Polish difficult to learn?

Memorisation and repeated exposure are key when it comes to enabling these chunks to become part of your interlanguage (i.e. the idiolect or linguistic system second language learners use). There’s no need to analyse these chunks for their grammatical attributes and cases etc.

My trusty “Polish in 4 weeks” book 

The previous section on chunks has its place in this post because learning Polish in chunks was partially my approach when I bought my first course book for learning Polish in 2006. This book is called Polish in 4 weeks.

The authors claim that the advantages of the book include “the natural contemporary language of the dialogues”. Well, I can say that the language of the dialogues is far from natural. However, the dialogues do represent (some) typical situations from everyday life. Most importantly, there are some useful chunks of language embedded within these dialogues. 

Repeated rereading of these dialogues at the start of my learning adventure helped a large number of chunks and many of the characters’ utterances to “stick”. 

In dialogue 1 – Sklep “karta” (In a Stationery Shop) – the very first utterance has been lodged in my mind for 17 long years:

Alice: O! Bardzo ładny kalendarz! (Oh! What a pretty diary!)

Unless your sole purpose in life is to loiter around stationery shops hollering ‘what a pretty diary!’, it’s a pretty useless utterance. Nevertheless, such nonsensicalities at least encouraged me to begin to notice and deduce basic grammatical patterns, which I acquired quite quickly. In this instance, kalendarz is a masculine noun as it ends in a consonant. Therefore, the adjective before it – ładny (pretty) – takes the ending -y because it accompanies a singular masculine noun. 

It’s worth pointing out that there are a few exceptions to the rules above concerning adjectival endings before masculine nouns. The hard -y ending becomes a soft -i when preceded by particular consonants (k or g, and in some cases also n or p):

• drogi samochód (“expensive car”)

Do you fancy some cake?

In dialogue 5 – W kawiarni (In the cafe) – Waldek asks his friend “Czy masz ochotę na ciasto?” (Do you fancy some cake?). Early on, it’s vital to not get overwhelmed by “funny” inflected endings – ochota (fancying) becomes ochotę in the accusative case. Conversely, I’m of the belief that it’s critical to build up a stock of chunks, sentence starters and question starters that are instantly retrievable in conversation. They become instantly retrievable through repeated exposure, rereading and personalisation. 

Personalisation

When you come across new words and chunks, it’s vital to personalise them. This means you should create two or three sentences about your own life, people you know and situations you’re familiar with which contain these new words and chunks. The purpose of all of this is, with regular rereading and repetition, these personalised sentences will be on the tip of your tongue and swirling around your mind in future conversations. This is the essence of fluency in a second language – being able to retrieve a wide range of chunks and personalised sentences at the drop of a hat.

For example, let’s imagine I’ve just come across the Polish word zasada (‘rule’ in English). My immediate goal would be to bend this word towards my experience and interests:

* I’m very familiar with the rules of snooker = Dobrze znam zasady gry w snookera

Regarding this personalised sentence, I’m not only preparing myself to retrieve it in a future conversation. I’m also picking up extra pieces of grammatical information as I go along. For instance, the feminine plural noun form of zasada is zasady in the accusative case (femine plural noun forms are the same in both the nominative and accusative cases). 

Anyway, I’ve written extensively about personalisation and the need to store vocabulary, chunks and personalised sentences in a Word-Phrase Table on English Coach Online. 

Overall, a foreign language is only hard to learn if you don’t have a language learning strategy to combat the supposed difficulty.

Four features of the Polish language which learners often complain are their nemesis

Let’s have a look at four features of the Polish language which might be particularly troublesome for learners to get a handle on. I shall draw some comparisons between English and Polish to highlight how those whose mother tongue is English might initially struggle with certain grammatical features of Polish.

1. Noun genders in Polish

The Polish gender system is very different from the English one – since gender in Polish is grammatical, whereas it is biological in English. For instance, the Polish word stół [table] is masculine, książka [book] is feminine, and jajko [egg] is neutral.

It’s worth mentioning that every noun has a grammatical gender and it’s not complicated to determine which is which. You can do it based on the last letter of a word (with a few exceptions):

Masculine nouns

These normally end in a consonant. Polish has eight vowels – o, a, I, e, y, u, ę, ą – meaning all the remaining letters are consonants. Based on that, we can assume that the majority of nouns in Polish are masculine.

There are some exceptions – some professions and sympathisers of some ideologies, despite ending in -a, refer to men. For example, artysta (artist), poeta (poet), pianista (pianist), socjalista (socialist), komunista (communist).

Interestingly, the Polish word for man (mężczyzna) ends in -a.

Feminine nouns 

These normally end in -a but there is a small group of words which end in a consonant or -i. For instance, (pani = lady / Mrs) gospodyni (landlady).

Neuter nouns

Neuter nouns end in – o, -e, -ię -ę and -um – no exceptions here.

We can distinguish two additional gender categories for plural forms – rodzaj męskoosobowy (masculine personal forms) and rodzaj niemęskoosobowy (non-masculine forms). These plural forms are very easy to spot:

• Masculine personal nouns – Masucline personal nouns refer only to people – when there is at least one man in a group. For example,  rodzice (parents), chłopcy (boys); or when we’re describing a group in a more general sense, for example, studenci (students) and Polacy (Poles). The gender of the people who belong to these groups is irrelevant.
• Non-masculine personal nouns – These refer to females, animals and objects. For example, if there is a group of 100 female students, we would say te studentki. But if a man joined the group, the form would change to ci studenci.

Why is it important to know the grammatical gender of nouns in Polish?

The gender of a noun has an influence on other parts of speech – adjectives, pronouns and numbers. For instance:

Ten bigos jest smaczny – This bigos is tasty

Ta zupa jest smaczna – This soup is tasty

To piwo jest smaczne – This beer is tasty

Te inteligentne kobiety – Those intelligent women

Ci inteligentni mężczyźni – Those intelligent men

Here are some verb forms in the past tense:

On czytał – He read

Ona czytała – She read

Ono czytało – It (a child) read

2. Polish is an inflected language

Open up any Polish grammar guidebook and you’ll soon come across the terms inflection or inflected. 

Polish is an inflected language. Essentially, this means that adjectives, nouns and pronouns change their endings to show their relationship to the remaining words in their sentence (i.e. their case). Therefore, unlike English, Polish does not have articles (a/an/the or some/any) to show the relationship between words in a sentence.

Each word has a number of inflectional forms: nouns and pronouns 14, verbs have 47 (excluding participles), adjectives 44, numerals up to 49, and adverbs 3. (Lubaszewski, 2000). 

In his 2000 paper, A Grammar for the Polish Inflection Lexicon, Lubaszewski provides the following list of inflection forms, with associated descriptions, for the personal male noun aktor (actor):