Polish: Beginner's Course (World Language) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

I have to confess that I'm not that far in the course, but I am very familiar with the Living Language approach, as I have the Japanese, Russian, Irish, Korean, and Chinese courses as well. That being said, this is a great course on standard Polish. the audio portion of the course is a great asset. This is because each lesson has an audio only part that reviews the lesson and gives you some audio only exercises. The grammar points are short, but clear and concise. Overall this is a good beginning book for learning Polish, and is a good stepping stone to move on from.

Polish is a very difficult language to learn, with a high level of variance in the inflection system. This book does not try to bog you down with the explanations of these problems. Which is a good thing for new learners. Instead it gives two appendices which give the FULL forms of all verbs and nouns used in the text.

Spoken World: Polish a great introduction to the Polish language. It just requires a LOT of memorizing, which is understandable. Plus the audio for the course is still one of the best out there in my opinion.

I am currently a beginner independently learning Polish with this text and two others (Teach Yourself Polish and Colloquial Polish). I have to admit that Spoken World: Polish, despite being only over a dozen lessons, is far better, in my opinion, than the other two in terms of dialogues, grammar explanations, readings, and useful exercises. I recommend Spoken World first and foremost over the other two.

Included in the course are six audio CD's and a textbook. Don't let the textbook's rather small-looking size fool you: It is full of the best appendices (verb conjugations and aspect, and, most importantly, as is critical in any Slavic language, a boatload of nouns in all the declension patterns), dialogues, and exercises I have seen. I don't consider myself to be unable to learn languages (I speak French and German fluently, and I'm learning Hungarian now), but with a language like Polish (even with my minor in Russian), you need a very thorough and clearly written text to even begin to penetrate the difficulty of Polish pronunciation and grammar. It is because of those mentioned appendices and the rather clear grammar explanations that led me to give high marks to this course package. In fact, I particularly like how the grammar topics are introduced with examples from the previous dialogues.

More often than not, language books will introduce a topic and illustrate the topic with a sentence that may (or may not) be disparately related to the dialogues or readings. This book introduces a topic (e.g. the instrumental case) and brings in examples directly from the dialogue you read when the lesson began (e.g. I am a student in your class). Another nice addition in each chapter is a reading passage (separate from the dialogue). These are rather short (ca. 100 to 200 words) passages written in full-blown, grammatical Polish, with a translation to follow. I found these to be invaluable as they helped me to utilize all the grammar topics introduced in that chapter. The exercises look like they are short and rather easy to complete. In fact, they are rather challenging (at least for me), and they require a good deal of effort. The audio CD's are fabulous. There are three to use for 'at home' with the text dialogue in front of you, and three for 'on the go' to be used without the text. The latter are great because they present not just the chapter's dialogue, but also explanations of grammar topics, examples of these topics, and even exercises.

The only main draw back is the glossary in the back of the book. It is not very extensive in that some words used in exercises do not appear in the glossary. I found this to be a little frustrating, and, hence, the reason I voted four, instead of five, stars. Of course, this problem can be rectified by doing a Google search, but I feel that words used in exercises that are not mentioned in vocabulary lists need to be in the glossary.

If you're wavering on a text to get, I urge you to get Spoken World: Polish first. It is a masterfully well done language book.

UPDATED MAY 2012: I have worked more through this book, and I would like to add, what I believe, may be a drawback for this book that was not readily apparent to me at my beginning stages of studying Polish. The book completely lacks any mention of spelling rules and/or the consonant 'softening' that is often exhibited when declining nouns (and sometimes verbs). This is most often seen when a noun ends in a 'hard' consonant, and you must change it to a 'soft' consonant (thus softening) before adding an ending. This phenomenon can best be illustrated in the locative case: Theater is 'teatr', but 'in the theater' would be, 'w teatrze' (nouns ending in a hard consonant, in this case 'r', must be softened before adding the locative ending-e; the softened 'r' here would be changed to soft 'rz', then the -e is added).

None of this is even mentioned when the locative case is brought up; in fact, there are no examples when the locative case is brought up.

Of course, there is a noun declension pattern table in the appendix that will do this for you, but a beginning Polish course should at least mention the softening phenomenon. For this, I would downgrade my rating to a 3.5, with a leaning towards a 4 star product mainly because there are very little Polish resources out there that are poorly done.

From various libraries I was able to compare many different types of Audio with book and one audio without a book (Pimsleur) to try to learn Polish. Living Language is the very best if you are a beginner who wants to learn to speak, read and write in the language. Pimsleur is good, too, but you only get to listen and repeat, no reading, and I can't always tell the endings of words without being able to read along. Reading along is very important to me when learning a language since sometimes you may hear things not quite as they really sound. Being able to see the word written really helps. Also with the Living Language I could go back to where I needed to hear something without having to hear the whole lesson over again. The Pimsleur CD won't do that, at least not the nine disk program I had. I really hated that because it was a big waste of time. Being forced to hear all over again what you already know just to hear one sentence or word is very boring. I would would say use both programs but if you can only afford one, buy Living Language. I am buying it myself right now. Everything else I looked at was nowhere near as good as Living Language, with Pitmsleur not far behind.