Verbs Are Hard, And Learning Words In General

I don't know about you, but I find learning verbs harder than learning just about every other part of speech.  I'd say that for me they are about ten times harder than learning every other type of word.  And Polish verbs just seem particularly difficult.  Polish is a fairly alien language for a native English speaker, and it's probably not much easier for anyone else who doesn't already speak a Slavic language.

I find myself reading the average sentence and doing pretty well with most words in the sentence except for the big gaping hole of meaning where the verb sits.  Actually, it's not as bad for me as it used to be because I've learned a decent number of verbs at this point.  But verbs are still the weakest part of my Polish vocabulary.   Maybe the first fifty verbs were relatively easy, but after that, learning verbs turns into a slog from hell.  There's a reason that you see books devoted solely to verbs in a given language.  And there's a reason you might not see, say, a book entitled "500 Italian Adjectives" (Now I'll probably get a comment from someone who has a book on 500 Italian Adjectives.  Still, if such a book exists, I don't think it disproves my point).

Often I study verbs by themselves, in isolation from other vocabulary, because I have to put in so much more study to get them down.  If I rotate them in with other words on the flash cards I am studying, I'll get a high percentage of all the other words, and then nothing when it comes to the new verbs I am looking at.  I can look at them over and over again, and still get no glimmer of recognition.  I read somewhere online that somebody suggested that you picture verbs as being on a sports field, like a football field, and picture somebody moving with the action the verb embodies.  Yeah, that didn't really help me at all; I tried that and then abandoned it when it wasn't giving me any better results.  What does seem to work for me is just to grind out the learning of the verb slowly and steadily, and not add too many new ones to my flash cards at the same time.  And I also try each time I see the word, to try to picture how to use it in different ways, to look at the conjugation of it and try to use different conjugations and tenses, and basically just work the word as much as I can.

The strange thing is, with verbs as well as with other words, I think they get stored in my brain fairly easily.  It's the retrieval that's a bitch. I can tell it's the retrieval end that is hard rather than the storage end because there's so many times when it just pops out of nowhere when it didn't seem like it was going to come forward at all.  And then there are what I call "savant days," when the retrieval is just simpler than usual for some reason.  But in general, it seems like it takes a while to build that neural pathway that allows for a consistent retrieval of the word.  It's like having a really cluttered closet and knowing the widget thingy you want is in there somewhere, but you have to do a ton of cleaning abd organizing to find it.

I do eventually get there with verbs as well as with other words.  It just takes a lot longer.  That's one reason I make so many blog posts that are centered around the different verbs (and other derivative words) one can make from a given root.  They are basically my study guides for when I find a verb or group of verbs I am finding to be difficult to learn, and I just look at the whole universe centered around the root for a unique look at the subject.

Polish Books Online

Want to read a book in Polish for free on your computer? You can go to this link to browse available Polish books on Project Gutenberg.  You can either read them as HTML books online, or download them to your computer or mobile device in various forms.

There are also a number of books in Polish, and a better selection, at wolnelektury.pl.  You can read them online or download them as well.  They also have a number of audiobooks. Some of the audiobooks you can follow along by opening another browser window or tab with the text (if the text is available).  You could even open the text in another browser window in Chrome and translate it into English (or any other language), if you wish.  However, since the text page is in a frame, Chrome won't prompt you to translate it.  I was able to translate text pages by right-clicking on the page and choosing "Translate into English."  Here is an example:  You could open up the audiobook "Brzydkie kaczątko" (The Ugly Duckling) in one window, open the text in another, and then open another window or tab in Google Chrome with the text and translate it.  Also, if there is an audiobook to accompany the text, you can just open the text link, and there will be a link at the top that says "Listen" that will open another window with the audiobook.

Random Polish Wikipedia Article

I recently added a window with a random Polish Wikipedia article to this blog. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the blog, you can see it, and you can even navigate to other Wikipedia pages (using the links provided or the search box) within the window.

More On Language Fluency: Słowotwórstwo

I did a post on language fluency a while back, but I wanted to talk about fluency a little more.  You might wonder what it takes to achieve fluency.  You might also wonder "how many words it takes before you can consider yourself fluent."

I used to think in those sorts of quantitative terms.  I thought that if I got to a certain number, and it had to be somehow measurable, I would be at the point where I was fluent.

That's not really the way to think about it.  You can have a vocabulary with very few words, but be at the point where you have practiced them very well and can fill gaps of words you don't know through intuition and contextual clues, and then respond without hesitation with the words that you know.

Or, at the other extreme, you could know a very large number of words, but still not have them embedded verbally to the point where you recognize them well and can easily create different forms of words out of them.  This is closer to where I am.  I probably have about 6000 Polish words that I have learned to the point where I can produce them fairly easily (that's a conservative estimate as I have about 10000 in rotation on Anki plus about another 4000 phrases and sentences), but have a difficult time recognizing them in conversation, and have some difficulty consistently producing them in the correct grammatical context.  I've probably gotten more fluent in some other languages with less words learned.

But that is OK for me.  I really enjoy learning new words, and so I have focused my learning on vocabulary more than most would.  You can tell that my posts mostly focus on vocabulary and the interrelationships between words and parts of words.  I'm more interested in "słowotwórstwo."  And I'm confident that at some point the fluency will arrive; maybe at a point that is later than it would be for a person who concentrates more on speaking and grammar.  But when it does arrive, I think I'll have a high breadth of expression.

A Helping Suffix: -Wisko

The suffix "-wisko" seems to refer to some sort of locus; if it's not an actual place, it is an appurtenance or helper that adds function to some other word widget's function (usually the precursor/prefix is a stand-alone, truncated or word stub noun).

The word most often used with this suffix is "nazwisko", which means "surname."

Examples:

nazwisko panieńskie - maiden name
pod własnym nazwiskiem - under one's own name
przybrane nazwisko - assumed name, stage name
pod przybranym nazwiskiem - under an assumed name
nazwisko rodowe -family name
pod cudzym nazwiskiem - under someone else's name
miała na nazwisko... - her surname was...

Here is an interesting Wikipedia article that talks about Polish surnames.  This will give you a little more background about Polish Surnames and also show you some types of surnames that provide further examples.  And here is a map of Polish surnames, whereby you can type a surname into the search box and find its frequency in different parts of Poland.

But I digress.  Here also are a couple of other "-wisko" words:

stanowisko - position, point of view

Examples:

stanowisko pracy - place of work
stanowisko kierownicze - managerial position
wysokie stanowisko - high-ranking position
stać na stanowisku, że.. - to take the view that...

środowisko - environment, surroundings

Examples:

środowisko naturalne - the natural environment
zanieczyszczenie środowiska - environmental pollution

Other derivative words:

gruzowisko - heap of rubble
legowisko - lair; dog bed
lodowisko - ice rink
mrowisko - anthill
przezwisko - [mean or humorous] nickname
urwisko - precipice, crag
uzdrowisko - spa, health resort
widowisko - spectacle, show
zjawisko - phenomenon
złomowisko - scrapyard, junkyard

Language Meditation

I've been trying to do at least once a day what I call language meditation.  That is, I will take a simple concept that has been a particularly difficult thing to retain through conventional study, and try to relax and focus my concentration on it instead of, say, on my breathing.  I'll try to work the word (if it is a word) through different scenarios and forms of the word (slowly and organically, only as it bubbles to the surface, and not through effort, but through visualization), and try to make it the core, unadulterated focus of my descent into relaxation--the mantra, so to speak.  I'll work on forgetting everything about the outside world except the concept I am studying (though I'd hardly call it studying, it's more like appreciation of a conceptual aesthetic).  My goal is to get my brain waves as far away from what would be necessary for associative or agglomerative study and put them more in the area that would be conducive to astral projection.  Looking at the colors of the concepts and hearing their synesthetic music, rather than creating logical and analytical pathways.

Trifecta!

Here are the three fects of my current linguistic odyssey:

Fect #1:

I've started studying Romanian in Polish.  Not only is it a good sideswipe from the unhappy accident that is studying-Polish-burnout, but it also helps with "running interference,", or, as I put it in a previous post, "practicing for diversion."  Why Romanian? It seems vaguely exotic, maybe even ethereal and otherwordly.  It's a Romance language, but it's been fellated by Slavic influence for centuries.  And it belongs to the Eastern Romance language family that ends its plurals in -i instead of -s.  Now that's just hot. If only I could find a good beginning Romanian text in Polish at a used bookstore (dream on...not in THIS country).

Fect #2:

Also, I'm enveloping myself in reading "Romeo I Julia, Tragedya w 5 aktach--Wiliam Szekspir."  First I had to get the right version off of the Gutenberg Project site.  It took me a couple of tries, but finally I found one that my e-reader would open.  When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way...

Fect #3:

Chinese, anyone?  Nin friggin' hao!  These videos are AWESOME for learning Mandarin.  Sometimes I get the feeling I'm spreading myself too thin.  But what the hell.  You only live once, and you gotta be ready for that moment when these one billion Chinese walk into a bar...  But seriously, it would be cool to speak the language spoken by more people in the world than any other--the language that over 14% of humanity utters natively.

And really, every trifecta should have a...

Bonus Fect:

This one doesn't count because it's only stupid English.  I've started a vocabulary list at Vocabulary.com called "Haphazard Devilous Munch" that consists of some of the most radically gnarly words that I could find that are "quiz-ready" on the site.  Granted, there are some much more severely sebacious words out there in the English language. For example, check out some of the words in this "Greek Words" list that someone else made.  But a lot of the serious munch in the Greek Words list can't be quizzed on the site because the powers-that-be haven't set up quizzes for them yet, whereas my munch is deliciously munchable.

Vocabulary Whore

I fully realize that I could probably become conversant faster if I would devote more study to things other than Polish vocabulary.  But the problem is, I'm a vocabulary whore.

There is a lot of time that I should be studying grammar, or listening to audio, or reading. And I realize that.  I do devote some time to those resources, but not nearly enough.  The problem is that I just like learning new words.  After I've studied a bunch, I always find a hundred more words that I would like to know.  So I add them to my flash cards.

Actually, they are usually there in the flash card deck already, so I just unsuspend them.  Sometimes they aren't, and I will add them to the deck.  And then I go back to studying vocabulary compulsively.

Today, I studied about 90% Polish, and 10% other languages (Dutch, German, Catalan, Italian, Czech and advanced Spanish--was there anything else? I forget).

I do devote some time to reading and translation.  I'll talk about the bulk of the reading I do in the next post.

A Primer On My Polish Studies

I've decided to start a blog about my Polish Language studies.  I've seen some other blogs out there of this sort and they have been helpful to me, so maybe this will be helpful to others as well.  I've made a few comments about the Polish language on David Morrison's most excellent blog about moving to Poland, No Home But The World, and maybe I'll incorporate and expand on the thoughts I've put there eventually.

I've been studying Polish for a little over two years now.  It's an incredibly difficult and complex language, and I would liken learning it to maybe doing a hundred-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.  I do have some experience with jigsaw puzzles, because a while back, a large group of people including myself completed a jigsaw puzzle with over ten thousand pieces, and it took us all over a year.  Of course, that was just attacking it sporadically, a few minutes a day.

I've been trying to study about two hours a day on average, which is a pretty large amount when you average out the fact that sometimes I will really bear down and study six hours a day, and sometimes I will burn out and not study for a couple of weeks.  The best and most productive thing I have found to do is to study for about four or five half-hour increments a day that are spaced out from each other.  On flash cards alone, I have averaged 735 cards a day over the life of my flash card deck, but only 470 a day over the last year (I know the exact number because my flash card program spits out all kinds of statistics).  And that's just on Polish...I'm also studying Dutch, German, Italian and Danish, but not with near the ferocity that I am applying to my Polish studies.  I probably spend about ten hours of Polish study for each hour of all the other languages combined.  Still, I had read on another Polish learner's blog that he studies about six hours of Polish for each hour of German and still knows German better because Polish is so complex and arcane.  I can relate.

And I strongly recommend Anki as a flash card program.  It's free and open-source (though donations are strongly encouraged and certainly deserved due to the excellent quality of the program), and there are a huge number of shared decks created by others.  But beware, the decks can vary in quality (since anybody can make them, they might not follow the best principles for learning; e.g., they might include too many facts on a card or just have cards for one direction of translation).  The Polish deck that I am using is excellent.  It was created by Per Ericksson, who really created one of the best language learning decks I have seen.  And I have added my own material to it so my deck is about 150% of the size of his (I have nearly 15000 facts and 30000 cards in mine; there are two cards for each fact because there is one for Polish-English, and one for English-Polish).  I emailed him many changes and corrections I had for a while and he incorporated them, but I guess he has not been maintaining it as diligently lately.  I don't want to put mine in the shared area because I don't want to supercede his, but if you want a copy of mine, let me know in a comment and I can send it to you (actually, I can send you a link to it so you can download it because it is so large it won't send in an email under most circumstances).  Another great thing about this deck is that I use it as a dictionary of first resort as well, by using the search function.

So after two years of study, I am probably at a low B1 level in reading and a mid-A2 level in speaking, and maybe a low A2 in understanding spoken speech (using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).  My speech skills (especially in understanding rapidly spoken speech) lag far behind my reading skills as I haven't been exposed to a lot of spoken language, and as my study methods are probably emphasizing vocabulary at the expense of grammar and verbal skills a lot more than a language course would make me do, mostly because I'm obsessed with knowing words and two- and three-word combinations of words in short phrases or idiomatic constructs.  So I'll probably learn about ten thousand words and idioms pretty well, then slowly start moving to more correctly using them and understanding them in speech.  That is probably not the way most people would learn...most would probably become "fluent" in a hundred words, then move up to a thousand, etc., but learning in a more balanced fashion and emphasizing verbal usage more.  Everybody finds their own path.

Anyway, that is probably enough for now.  I hope to maintain this blog at least sporadically; knowing my history of blogging there may be times when I am idle for a while.  But if somebody bugs me to put up a blog post, or suggests a topic for one, I might be spurred to action.