Resources for learning Polish?

February 20, 2008 4:45 PM

What can I buy, download or find online to help me learn as much Polish as possible in the next ten days, with a budget of about £50?

I currently have no access to a bricks-and-mortar bookshop to compare different books, and no access to native speakers. I have some words of Polish already, and will be working (again) with native speakers in the near future, but I'd really like to try and get some understanding of grammar (and spelling) before heading back into highly informal attempts to learn new words from guys who have themselves learned most of their English casually.

posted by Lebannen to writing & language (9 answers total)

Rosetta Stone. One of the choices is a 3-month online subscription for $110.
posted by Class Goat at 5:24 PM on February 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

dzien dobre

I know people who use Skype to do language exchanges to get some native practice (e.g. they want to learn english / you want to learn polish)
posted by bottlebrushtree at 5:40 PM on February 20, 2008

ESL Polish for free

More languages here
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 7:54 PM on February 20, 2008

Rosetta Stone. One of the choices is a 3-month online subscription for $110.

Check out your local library... you may be able to utilize it through their website for free. At least, that's the case with my city's library here in the US.
posted by fusinski at 8:49 PM on February 20, 2008

check out lingvosoft's stuff:

http://www.lingvosoft.com/main.jsp;jsessionid=bc3095958752765192e4?useExtendSearch=false&do=products-search_rez&category=0&keyword=polish&search.x=21&search.y=15

http://www.lingvosoft.com/LingvoSoft-Suite-Deluxe-English-Polish-for-Pocket-PC/

the full packages are about 50% over your budget, but it may be worth the extra money. i LOVE their indonesian and japanese programs. what's super super useful for me is the software dictonaries that i can put on my windows se phone/pda - it's great having a fast and simple dictonary on this little handheld gadget i carry with me at all times, and the way the program is set up is very intuitive, useful, and fast to use, so you can find the word you're looking for quickly and not drop the conversational ball for an inordinate amount of time. if you have a pda/windows phone, and will be dealing with polish people who speak english as a second language on an ongoing basis, i think these programs might be very very useful for you, and worth the extra cash.

looking a bit further at their site, you could just order, say, the pocketpc english/polish dictionary, and the flashcards for your home computer, for under $100
posted by messiahwannabe at 2:23 AM on February 21, 2008

Class Goat - that's quite odd and annoying, because looking at rosettastone.co.uk it's £69.95, which is some $25 more expensive, and a bit outside my current budget. Definitely something to save for another time, though. Thanks.

fusinki - my county library service is unfortunately not so advanced, because that would definitely have been a good plan.

bottlebrushtree, cześć, dziękuję! I'll look at that possibility another time, but I know I'll shortly be spending a month or so with Polish guys, so conversation practice as such isn't what I most want right now.

B(oYo)BIES, that's unfortunately for Polish speakers learning English, nice try though.

messiahwannabe, that's another one to go on the wishlist (along with the pda, heh) for when the finances are improved, thanks. I've already got a dictionary on my computer, but there's a limit to how useful it can be when I don't yet understand how verbs work, or how to make nouns plural (one boot is jeden but and two boots are dwa buty, but a pair of boots is jedna para butuf (give or take spelling), and I don't know anyone who can explain to me what's going on here).
posted by Lebannen at 3:46 AM on February 21, 2008

If grammar's what you're looking for, I just did a google search for "polish grammar" and in between the commercial results I found a few useful free resources, including some pdfs of grammar books. (The second link leads to this course)

I didn't look at anything too thoroughly but there seems to be a decent amount to start with.

Another idea is to look through Amazon for some textbooks with good reviews. Hopefully some of them will let you search through the text of the book; that way you can search for specific vocabulary words or concepts and get an idea of how well the book covers them. (You need to sign in as an amazon user to search for specific text.)

Good luck
posted by trig at 4:57 AM on February 21, 2008

live mocha, an online community of peer teaching in foreign languages, was mentioned in the NYTimes this week. Maybe it would work?
posted by crush-onastick at 7:04 AM on February 21, 2008

One Minute Polish It's a Podcast.
I don't know how good it is, but I regularly listen to Radiolingua's Coffee Break Spanish and enjoy it very much.
posted by annapanna at 2:28 AM on February 27, 2008