Product Description

This best-selling Polish course for beginners has been completely revised and up-dated. Two 60-minute cassettes are available to help perfect pronunciation and comprehension skills.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53332 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-23
• Original language: Polish, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From the Back Cover
This new edition of the best-selling Polish course for beginners has been completely rewritten to make learning the language easier and more enjoyable than ever before.
Written by an experienced teacher and author, Colloquial Polish offers a step-by-step approach to the language as it is spoken and written today. No previous knowledge of Polish is required.
Features include:
Lively dialogues
Lots of exercises with full answer key
Jargon-free grammar notes and a quick reference grammar
Extensive Polish-English and English-Polish word lists
With all the language support you'll need, Colloquial Polish will soon have you speaking, reading and writing Polish with confidence.
Two 60-minute cassettes are available to complement this course book. Recorded by native speakers, they will prove invaluable in helping you perfect your punctuation and comprehension skills.

Customer Reviews

Polish - a complicated language reasonably well explained
I've been learning Polish in an evening class for 2 years now and we've use this book as our class text book all the way through (and still haven't finished it). I started it on my own before I joined the class and found I could keep up with the explanations on my own until about chapter 6, but after that without regular practive from a class, I couldn't keep enough of what had happened before in my head to keep up with the exercises.

Also, the grammar got increasingly complex, and I'm say this from the perspective of someone with a German degree which means that I already understood a lot of the grammar to start with. However, that's not the book's fault - even German grammar is a doddle in comparison to Polish grammar - and at least at the start of the book, the explanations are comprehensive and reasonably easy to understand (I'm not so sure about the end of the book, where it tackles more difficult topics, but then I'm not sure that these topics can be comprehensively explained in less than 20,000 words).

Don't be put off though. The book does it explain it all well, and it's a good extra resource if you are taking a class and/or using other books. It's just not ideal as a single teach-yourself book. But then, I'm not convinced it's humanly possible to teach-yourself Polish from one book though, although a person with steely determination might be able to learn Polish largely based on the book - but be warned, it's going to be an uphill struggle and take longer than you expect from the size of the book. Basically, if you finish (and understand) everything in the book, you'll be fully equipped to converse in mainly correct Polish, but in order to fit all the necessary information in, it tends only to tell you stuff once, rather than offering the sort of practice you need to retain the information.

Good if you have help, but not a stand-alone book
I found this book a struggle to learn from by myself even though I spoke a little Polish already.

When going through the book with a native speak it was excellent. The topics helped me cover a good range of vocab with real life examples.

I recommend this book for anyone using it as part of a course or who has a Polish speaking friend/tutor to go through with it with them but not as a stand alone book to learn by yourself. There are many other books that explain how to prnounce words clear than can be found here.

There are accompanying tapes which make this book a lot more useful but these are not included and must be ordered separately.

Polish language learning
i have found this book quite good but simply because i am studying it with my girlfriend. i was under the impression that the tapes came with the book but they do not. to actually find this book useful you must either have a native speaker, or a basic knowledge of the language. i don't think it's the book's fault, it's just you'll find it near impossible to learn polish word structure on your own. after starting the book i can honestly say that you should not feel intimidated by the word structure, eg. przypraszam. you will get used to this very quickly with some help. the book is also very good for vocabulary and the topics and very useful. JUST DON'T TRY LEARN POLISH ON YOUR OWN !!!