Help me teach my partner Polish!

October 2, 2008 2:45 PM

Can you help me teach my partner Polish?

I am a fluent Polish speaker (early-teens fluency, first language and retained through speaking with my family) and my girlfriend is an native English speaker who needs to learn to speak Polish. We are looking for textbooks or workbooks that will be helpful in creating a lesson-plan that I can use to give her Polish lessons and that will also allow her to study independently. We aren't really interested in audio - I can cover that stuff myself. Just looking for books.

posted by crazy finger to education (7 comments total)

I got the "Hurra Po Polsku" book, but it doesn't have the teaching techniques of how to apply the exercises. And you said you don't need listening. Here are some free online books in pdf that come recommended to me by others, though I ended up not following through with learning Polish yet.
posted by Listener at 3:22 PM on October 2, 2008

Czesc, jak sie masz? is what we used. It now comes with a CD, which your partner may find helpful. The stories follow a neat little soap opera: will Agnieszka choose her drab businessman boyfriend or the dashing French journalist?

Schenker's Beginning Polish is more old-fashioned, and slightly grueling, but probably the most thorough introductory text out there.

Hope this helps. Have fun!
posted by orrnyereg at 3:44 PM on October 2, 2008

I've got no personal experience with "Colloquial Polish", but both "Colloquial Latvian" and "Colloquial Norwegian" have been very useful for my family. They have no "Teacher's Companion" volumes or anything like that, but have a nice progression and useful excercises, many non-audio.
posted by Harald74 at 1:29 AM on October 3, 2008

And one thing: We (I'm Norwegian, she's Latvian) did not make much progress until we commited to not speaking English with one another.
posted by Harald74 at 1:30 AM on October 3, 2008

Mowimy po polsku was pretty good, as I recall, though it's probably a bit dated.

She should read her (your?) home. Label everything in the home so she starts associating the Polish word directly with the thing, not the Polish word with the English word that she associates with the thing. You can even sneak sentences into this by describing where things are -- "telewizor jest na stole" stuck to the television that is on the table, etc.
posted by pracowity at 2:50 AM on October 3, 2008

Give Livemocha a shot. They have structured lessons, slowly introducing vocabulary and at each stage exercising reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. It seems like they have Polish lessons.

The idea is that you rely on other members of the community to correct your writing and speaking, but since you speak Polish, you should be able to do it for him -- and if you get an account, you can even do it online whenever is convenient for you.

I just signed up for the site, and it seems OK. My only frustration is waiting for other people to look at my submissions to tell me how bad they are/aren't.
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 8:53 AM on October 3, 2008

Replace "him" with "her"...
posted by TheyCallItPeace at 8:55 AM on October 3, 2008