Nie rozumiem, mowię trochę po polsku!
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum
Well, now that I’ve started to learn Polish, I know for sure that Indonesian language, or so-called Bahasa, is very easy 
No kidding! Bahasa has NO genders for the nouns, NO conjugations for the verbs, NO tenses, NO plural forms, and NO declinations for the nouns and its corresponding adjectives.
Let’s compare to Polish language which has:
- 32 characters in its alphabet,
- 3 genders (masculine, feminine, neutral) plus singular or plural forms for their nouns,
- 3 tenses (past, present, future) and 6 pronouns (ja, ty, on/ona/ono, my, wy, oni/one) which should be taken into account when deciding the proper verb conjugations
- and, oczywiście, the famous 7 cases to determine which declinations (changes in word endings) to be used. Those 7 cases are: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, locative, and vocative cases which depends on the role of the word(s) in a sentence.
For most people, the cases are the most difficult part of język polski. It even impacts people’s names. For example:
a) To jest Bill Clinton (This is Bill Clinton)
b) Hillary jest żona Billa Clintona (Hillary is Bill Clinton’s wife)
c) Chciałabym spotkać się z Billem Clintonem (I would like to meet with Bill Clinton)
Corollary, it is NOT easy to learn Polish. You need to have a conducive learning place to accelerate your language learning skill. And I found it in IKO, the Polish Institute for Foreigners. See, I’m not promoting the course, but I have to admit that their learning method is very effective for the new beginners. And thus I just want to share the method they used in the new beginner class (A0 level) that I attended in this January, since I do think it is the effective way to learn new language. Certainly, I will write this according to my perception (based on my experience in the class), not because I read their manual of teaching.
First of all, if you are a fresh beginner in the new language, I strongly advise to take an intensive course. Drill yourself. For this, you must have enough time to study at the course and to review it once in a while at home, because it will probably become exhausting or overwhelming in the second week. But hang on, it worths the result. After that, you can go slower by taking regular courses. In my case, I took 3 weeks intensive course from 12-30 January 2009 (which explained why I rarely had time to write new posts in this blog in January). Another thing why I decided to attend the intensive class is that I kinda felt I’m just wasting my time here; 3 months living in Poland and I hadn’t learn anything about the language.
Now, about the method. Again, this is for the new beginner: the emphasis is to get you TALKING and not writing,
UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING not grammatical comprehension,
REPEATING and not to jump to new subjects before you review the previous one,
and CONTEXTUAL PRACTICE in which you are asked to do a lot of role play using your own words and not just sitting listening to the teacher.
Further description on the above emphasis:
1. TALKING, not writing
You can only write when you are given time to write. When the teacher is explaining, pay attention and just listen to it. In my perception, in class you learn to listen, understand, and speak the words or idioms; while in home you need to review how it is written.
2. UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING, not grammatical comprehension
It would be extremely hard for a foreigner to fully grasp the Polish grammar in the beginning (see my note above). So just focus in understanding the meaning first, because it matters more in a two-way communication. Do not worry too much about the grammar at this stage, even the intermediate students and the Polish natives themselves still frequently make grammatical errors.
3. REPEATING, not jumping
When it comes to learning a new language, the phrase “Practice Makes Perfect” depicts the journey. You can’t go too fast in learning difficult language like Polish, take your time to repeat and refresh the previous lessons before you start learning the new chapter. How would you do it? By doing Q&A games, pictures guessing, words matching, and certainly.. lots of laughters and praises during the sessions. No criticism, everyone is learning.
4. CONTEXTUAL PRACTICE
From the very beginning, the idea of learning Polish in this stage is to enable you to communicate and thus the content should be practical and contextual. So the course material is based on daily conversations that are likely to happened. In this stage, we learn:
- how to greet and introduce ourselves,
- numbers and how to ask prices,
- hours and how to tell time,
- common verbs (which mostly describes daily activities and hobby) and their conjugations,
- common adjectives especially those which are used to describe people’s appearances
It would be too soon to tell that I can talk Polish now. Mowię bardzo trochę po polsku! But it’s a great feeling to be able to understand and say more sentences in the language of which country you newly reside in. Add to this, is the benefit of getting some new wonderful friends..
Moi drogie kolegami w IKO
