Archive for the ‘Polish’ Category
Mar
Mar
Can you learn a language in eight days?
It’s March 8th, so I want to wish a happy International Women’s Day to all my female readers today. And this year, it happens to coincide with Fat Tuesday, which means that here in Chicago, we also celebrate Pączki Day. (The Polish actually celebrated this last Thursday.) And speaking of Polish, that brings me to…
Mar
Mar
That’s a beautiful language!
Category: General, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish · Tags: pronunciation,sounds
This morning I was talking with David Mansaray about languages that sound beautiful, and about their tendency sometimes to lose their luster. This provides me a great introduction to a related topic that I’ve been thinking about lately.
How our view of a language changes
I remember when I first started learning Spanish. I was…
Mar
Mar
Guest reading: Prawiek i inne czasy
This is the first installment of a new weekly feature I’m going to do here, featuring non-English speakers reading in their native language. You’ll hear native pronunciation, and be able to read along and improve your comprehension. I hope you’ll find these posts useful!
Our first contribution comes from Ewelina Gonera, a native Polish speaker…
Apr
Apr
What does it mean to learn a language?
What does it mean when you say you want to learn a language? What do you expect to be true before you have learned a language? And what is happening when you are learning a language…? That phrase is pretty powerful, and yet pretty vague. Apparently, everyone understands it differently.
A little
Apr
Apr
Polish, for Russian speakers
A large part of the reason for my ability to rapidly pick up on Polish was the fact that it is a Slavic language, and as such, it shares a lot of similarities with Russian, a language which I already know quite well. I had already overcome many of the most difficult aspects of learning…
May
May
Create urgency!
Until last month, all of my travels had been to places where I already spoke the language. But when I went to Poland last month, in spite of the fact that I had learned a lot of Polish in a very short amount of time, I was not fluent and there was a lot I…
Dec
Dec
Not a total bust
As I mentioned in my last post, it’s clear that I will not be speaking fluent Turkish by the end of this year – even if I were to be amazingly productive for the rest of this month. But it’s still not a total bust. I did learn a lot this year!…
First, obviously, I
Feb
Feb
Brute force Greek
Category: Greek, Polish · Tags: blitzkrieg approach,brute force fluency,learning materials
In previous posts, I’ve already described the process I used for my first month of Greek study, which has been mostly about getting comfortable reading and writing in the new alphabet, learning pronunciation rules, and learning some basic phrases.
I’ve already impressed my Greek coworker twice this month with the amount I’ve learned in a…