tips for a westerner learning polish?

bernjThreads: 1 Joined: Jul 11, 08	Jul 11, 08, 00:49 / #
i've decided to learn polish. my family lives there and my father was born there, but he never taught me. i'm sure many westerners here have learned the language but i am not sure i'll ever be able to master it. i've found some lessons on youtube, but it seems that i can't even comprehend it and i cannot discern one word from the other. the language just seems to come out as noise. can anyone point me to some good free lessons? i know english and french and i was able to learn french with relative ease and i am pretty apt when it comes to learning a new language, but polish seems to be on a whole new level.

PolskaDollThreads: 44 Posts: 4,134 Joined: Jun 15, 07	Jul 11, 08, 04:18 / #
One of our members, janusz, has kindly put together a serious of videos to help people learning Polish. These are available here. There are many other tips and hint in the language sections of the forum. The language is difficult to learn but take it slowly and you'll get there. :)

Cardno85Threads: 33 Posts: 858 Joined: Jul 11, 08 MEMBER	Jul 11, 08, 08:44 / #
I am in a similar boat bernj. I feel terribly guilty working with a lot of polish people who are having to speak english and, being scottish, I naturally speak very fast (even when speaking what i think is slow) so I am hard to understand. Because of this I have decided to try and learn some polish. So far I am learning a word a day from each of the 5 staff and getting grammar tips from the girlfriend (who, worryingly, speaks better english than i do). That's all really helpful but then I have become fascinated by it all and want to learn more. So cheers for the link :)

sausageThreads: 25 Posts: 1,053 Joined: Sep 21, 07	Jul 11, 08, 08:51 / #
bernj: can anyone point me to some good free lessons? A good way is to do a skills swap (perhaps after learning some basic vocabulary)... Teach someone your native language whilst they learn yours. You can either get a penpal or converse via Skype etc. These sites are dedicated language partner finding sites huitalk.com italki.com Of course there is also good old gumtree.