It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on various (non language related) projects – although I will before long (I hope) add some free iPhone language learning apps to SurfaceLanguages.

Enough of that.  I want to talk about my Polish progress. As anyone who reads or who has read this blog will know, I’m finding it extremely difficult.  This isn’t surprising as Polish is a difficult language for a non slavic language speaker to learn. And just to clarify I don’t mean it is difficult to say ‘my name is …’ or ‘I live in …’, but to have more meaningful conversations. (I’m approaching fifty and am not interested in saying how r u, wotz up, lol etc.)

At the moment I’m not focusing on speaking (as I don’t have time for a regular conversation partner) but I want to understand and read. One thing I have noticed about many language learning blogs is that the writers are younger. The advantage of being young isn’t that you can’t learn languages when you are older, or that it is more difficult, but you have less commitments.

Less commitments = more time.

I don’t have much spare time, but what I do have is an hour in the morning when I walk my dog. I also have fifteen minutes in the evening. As I said, I have many demands on my time.

I no longer use Assimil Polish, and wouldn’t recommend it. It becomes too difficult too quickly. Instead  each evening I spend my fifteen minutes going through one of the stories from Mr Real Polish (there are one hundred along with variations, questions and answers and so on) , and during the walk listen to these at random.

Fifteen minutes is the time I need to understand a story when I hear it at random on the playlist.

My comprehension is definitely improving, and many of the more common Polish words are now starting to stick.

I am making progress – albeit slowly.

Besos,

MF