Cursing In Polish

Probably some of the most important words you can learn in any language (after you learn where you can run off to when you are doing the pee dance, and where you can get something to eat that is not currently squirming) are swear words.  Expressing frustration, anger, ridicule and disgust are important parts of creating shades of meaning, and Polish seems to be especially expressive in this regard, next to maybe Russian.  The Polish nation has been through a wide range of historically frustrating experiences (to put it mildly), and this has colored the vernacular with a wide palette.

One site that has a plethora of cussage is "YouSwear" which has a number of Polish curse words, among other languages (curiously enough, they also have curse words in "Chicken").  There is also the Toolpaq Guide To Polish Curse Words as well, which is more systematic and discriminating in its treatment.  Another list is on Nawcon, which has a page called "Polish Language Swearing."

A site that is not quite as comprehensive is the "Cursing And Swearing Dictionary," which, nonetheless, seems to cover some of the basics.  There is another short list on insults.net, and a short blog post on Transparent, which discusses usage somewhat but not nearly enough.  Also, there are some words on Memrise, but you can only see five words a page and there are a total of twenty.

Doubtless there are other sites out there as well...let me know if you find the gold mine.

Polish Language Learning Recommendations

In my last post, I talked about many of the books I have used in my Polish studies.  I've also done various posts on different sites on the Internet (pay sites and free sites) that are good for learning Polish.  Out of all of these, which would I recommend the most? Depends on whether you want comprehensive or cheap. And all bets are off on the books if you are actually in Poland--you'll find a whole different palette there.  But at least the websites I mention here will be available there.  You might want to download any .pdf files you find because you never know when they might disappear off the Web.

Cheap (Or Even Free!):

Each one of these cheap options has a free option as well, and some of the best choices are free.  It is always best to get stuff from more than one source to diversify.

Text--Polish in 4 Weeks Part I.  To go even cheaper, get whatever you can find at the thrift store that is comparable.  For free, you can use the University of Pittsburgh's basic first-year materials.  You can probably find some basic lessons on YouTube or through a search engine, but you might not find anything comparable to a good first-year text.  You can also try the free Foreign Service Institute course; the Polish text is here at the FSI site, but unlike other languages, they don't have audio along with the text.

Vocabulary--Anki (here is a list of Polish decks to choose from, including the BIG one I helped work on; you have to download the free program to use them) and Internet Polyglot, supplemented with any texts you have (you can always enter more words yourself into an Anki deck).  Free.

Audio--Real Polish online for free; also Polish in 4 Weeks (but make sure you get one with the CDs).  Or you can read this post for information on how to get free audiobooks at http://wolnelektury.pl along with accompanying text and translation.

Written narratives--Wikipedia Method and Real Polish.  Free.

Grammar--go with the free Oscar Swan grammars online (basic and comprehensive, download them because who knows how long they'll be available). (note...the comprehensive one is no longer available).

Dictionary--Larousse or whatever else you can find cheap...most of the pocket dictionaries are pretty much interchangable.  Buy the books at a thrift store if possible.  Or for free, use this dictionary online; it only goes in one direction (Polish-English), but you can look up words in English to be translated into Polish by using the search function of your browser or of Adobe Acrobat.  You can also find Polish-English dictionaries through search engines online, but I'm not all that crazy about them...mostly they are only search text boxes that just come up with words.  And Google Translate probably does a better job of this than most of them and also gives you pronunciations (and translations into and from multiple languages).

Comprehensive: 

Texts--both Polish in 4 Weeks books (Part I and Part II) for first exposure, the dense Teach Yourself Polish for in-depth treatment, and any other text(s) for comparative treatment.

Vocabulary--Anki (see entry above for more info) and Internet Polyglot, supplemented with any texts you have (you can always enter more words yourself into an Anki deck).  Though these are free, they are probably the best vocabulary learning sources you will find.

Audio--Pimsleur CDs (get the comprehensive version), Real Polish (you can buy the supplemental materials online for extra instructional support) and PolishPod101 (subscription service online).  I wouldn't recommend spending a ton of money on Rosetta Stone.

Written narratives--Polish in 4 Weeks (Part I and Part II), Wikipedia Method, Real Polish.

Grammar--basic and comprehensive Swan (buy his book for moral support if you use the free stuff a lot), and Polish An Essential Grammar.

Dictionaries--Larousse for quick-and-dirty, Kosciuszko for under-the-hood.

Polish Noun Declension

Earlier I did a post about Polish Verb Conjugation and where to find resources to assist with conjugating Polish verbs.  Now I'd like to talk a little about where to find resources to decline Polish nouns, and also touch on adjectives and pronouns as well, since they must be declined as well.

Wikibooks has a series that shows some tables with example nouns and their declensions.  There are three different pages, one for each gender:

• Masculine Noun Declension
• Feminine Noun Declension
• Neuter Noun Declension

There is also a page on Wikibooks that talks about the general rules for Polish noun cases. 

Wiktionary has a more comprehensive list of Polish nouns, many of which have declension tables (you must click on the "show" link under "declension" to show the table; not all of them have this feature).  Each noun is listed alphabetically but you can jump to different letters using the alphabetical links near the top of the page.  There is also a brief and so far incomplete discussion of declension rules on Wiktionary at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Polish_nouns.

You can also find links to a couple of excellent grammar books in .pdf form on the Web.  The first is Oscar Swan's excellent "Polish Grammar In A Nutshell."  The general rules for nouns are in Chapter 3 and there are some tables of sample noun declensions on pages 24-28.  The next one is "A Consise Polish Grammar" by Ronald F. Feldstein and it talks about nouns in Chapter 3.  General rules for declension are on pages 41-56.  Both of these books also have information on declining adjectives and pronouns as well. Of course, page numbers and/or chapters that I have mentioned here may changed if the books are revised at some point.

There is a .pdf file of a much more comprehensive grammar, also by Oscar Swan, "A Contemporary Polish Grammar."  This deals with most topics in much more detail than the other two grammar books previously mentioned.  Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have extensive discussions of noun declension for feminine, masculine and neuter nouns respectively and also have some fairly inclusive tables of declension.  Chapters 6 and 7 talk about declining adjectives and pronouns.

There is also a good survey of noun declension on Grzegorz Jagodziński's excellent grammar site (the main link in English is here). There are links that show patterns and tables for various types of nouns, as well as adjectives and pronouns.

A brief table of the rules of declension (with no example nouns declined) can also be found (in Polish) at http://www.hamlet.edu.pl/uczen/?id=koncowki.  There is another brief but somewhat confusing declension table at http://www.polish-translators.com/deklinacja.html which is in both Polish and English.

There is some talk (also in Polish) about the rules for different noun cases on the Polish Wikipedia site at http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deklinacja_(j%C4%99zykoznawstwo). 

Finally, I also have made a set of flash cards called "Polish Nouns Declined" that I have developed for Anki (wow, they have recently really revamped their main page!).  You have to download the software, which is free and open-source, and then go to the list of shared decks within the software program.  (I also have created a deck for "Polish Verbs Conjugated" and have made contributions to Per Eriksson's "Polish-English" deck as well [though the Polish-English deck I am currently using has about 50% more material than the one on the site].  All of these shared flash card decks are completely free.)

Doubtless other resources are out there as well but this list should assist you in finding a good deal of information on declining nouns, adjectives and pronouns.

Religious Texts in Polish (and other languages)

I remember reading somewhere that a lot of people used the Bible to learn languages, since it was readily available translated into many languages, and since it was relatively standardized across editions, so a Bible in one language could be easily compared to one in another language.  So I looked for a place to find a copy of a Polish Bible online and found http://www.wordplanet.org/pl/index.htm.

But then I got to thinking about other religious texts.  I was wondering if one could find a Quran in Polish as well.  I found this site that has the Quran translated into several languages, including Polish.  You just have to scroll down to find the link to the Polish language version.  It is in .pdf form, so you can save it to your computer or tablet as well.

What about other religious texts?  I couldn't find the Talmud online, but apparently it has been recently translated into Polish.  I couldn't find any information about the Torah in Polish.  The Bhagavad Gita has apparently been translated as well, but does not appear to be on the Internet.

And some of the Analects of Confucius are available in Polish as well.

Polish Verb Conjugation

OK, so you have learned that swell new Polish verb (or pair of verbs, one for perfective and one for imperfective aspect), but you want to know where to find some conjugation tables.  Where do you go?

There are a number of free resources on the Web for verb conjugation.  My first stop is usually Wiktionary at the link http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Polish_verbs.  There is a list of verbs there by infinitive from A-Z and you can look up the conjugations; just be sure and click on the "show" link to show the conjugation.  You can also look up auxiliary verbs, or search for verbs based on whether they are perfective or imperfective.  It's not an exhaustive list, though.  Just because it is my first stop doesn't necessarily mean it's the best place to go.  There are still a lot of verbs that you can't find there, but it is growing surprisingly quickly.

Next I go to bab.la at http://pl.bab.la/koniugacja/polski/ (or the same site in English at http://en.bab.la/conjugation/polish/), which seems to have a lot more verbs.  Once you get past the alphabetical listing, the listing by each letter of the alphabet is characterized only by "page numbers", so you have to make an approximation of what verb will be on which page (this is an improvement over the previous incarnation, which had no alphabetical listing at all, and you had to guess which page the verb you are looking for would be on based on its position in the alphabet and the popularity of its beginning letter). There is also a search box you can use to search for the verb you want to conjugate...one interesting feature about this search box is that you don't have to type the special characters in the word (e.g., you can type "a" instead of "ą", or "c" instead of "ć", at least in the verbs I tried).

Then there is Tasting Poland at http://www.tastingpoland.com/language/verb/verb_forms.html.  This site has the added advantage that in many cases you can look up multiple verb forms rather than just the infinitive, and it usually presents the conjugations in pairs with both the perfective and imperfective side by side.  You can either search by letter (actually by groups of letters of the alphabet), or if you prefer to search on a page that has only infinitives, you can go to http://www.tastingpoland.com/language/verb/verb_infinitives.html (or this page for the same list with diacritical marks disabled).  This site also does an adequate job of linking the imperfective and perfective verb pairs, listing the verb pairs, and listing the conjugations for both members of the verb pair for most (but not all) of the verbs.

There is also a site that has a labyrinthine discussion of many facets of the Polish language and Polish grammar, all in Polish.  Its main page for Polish verb conjugation is at http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/pl/koniug00.html or http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/en/koniug00.html in English, but you might want to check out its main page also at http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/gram/index.html (there is a version of the site in English also but it may not be as complete).  This is a good site for discovering all the conjugation types and sub-types, and the categorization structure used here seems to be extremely comprehensive.

Another stop is Wikisłownik at http://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kategoria:polskie_czasowniki, which is Wiktionary in Polish.  There seem to be a different selection of verbs here, but again, it's not all that complete.  And, strangely enough, there seem to be less verbs here than on the English Wiktionary site, but they are not duplicative of the English site, and I have found some verbs on the Polish site that are not on the English one.  There are also not a lot of actual conjugation tables for the verbs but there is a lot of useful information for each verb.  When there is a conjugation table, it is usually under "odmiana." For some verbs, if there is a conjugation table, you can hit the "pokaz" link to see more of the conjugation, usually beyond just present tense.  Or there might be an "aneks" page that shows the type of conjugation it falls under even if it's not for the actual verb you are looking for.  Here is the appendix page for Polish Verbs, which has links near the top for all the different conjugation types.  Here also is an example of Conjugation I, and you can go to the other conjugations from the links at the bottom of this page.

There is also Verbix, where you can choose from a search box or a list of verbs. The character set seems a little messed up sometimes so you might have to figure out what characters substitute for the wrong ones listed.  Also it seems to only list imperfective verbs and the search box won't find perfective verbs.  But it does list the perfective verb in the conjugation table.

You can also try Gigadictionary.  Simply type the verb you are looking for into the "search" box and most of the time it will come up with a conjugation table if the verb is in their database.

One of these sites listed above will probably have a conjugation for the verb you are looking for.  Most of these sites don't do a great job of linking up the verb pairs of imperfective and perfective verbs, in my opinion.

There is also the book 301 Polish Verbs (Barron's), which I sometimes use as a ready reference as well.  Of course, you have to buy it (and there doesn't seem to be an e-book version), but it's not too expensive.  The biggest advantage of this book is that it does link up the imperfective and perfective verbs, both on the conjugation pages and in the index.  Another advantage is it lists similar verbs with the same roots but different prefixes on the same page.  The biggest disadvantage is that it has a limited selection of verbs.

Some other sites are Conjugations of Common Verbs, which only have a few of the most common Polish verbs, Verb In Polish, which once again only has a few sites (and mostly talks about rules of conjugation), and Deklinacje I Koniugacje, which covers some rules of both noun declension and verb conjugation.  Also there is Parts Of Speech: Verbs, which has some minor discussions about verb conjugation.  These are not comprehensive sites, but might provide some minor clarifications.  Remember also that you can open any Polish sites (or sites in just about any foreign language) in Google Chrome and it will offer a translation for you.

You might also want to check my blog post on Polish Noun Declension for information on declining nouns, as well as adjectives and pronouns.

Internet Polyglot: More Free Language Learning

Another pretty good site for completely free language learning is Internet Polyglot.  They have lists of words from different categories that you can learn (e.g., animals, colors, numbers, and more esoteric categories).  They have sound on the words, but you have to click on them to hear them.  They have a series of games you can play.  But as a caveat, all you get here is vocabulary.  There are no narratives, there is no grammar, there is no interplay with a human, just words applied in different games.

First off, there is the "slide show" which is just a series of slides where they play a word in one language and then wait for a while before they play the translation.  This is the closest to traditional flash cards as you can guess the answer.  You can check or uncheck a box that will "autoplay" each slide, or play the next one automatically after a short interval without you having to click anything.

The easiest, once you have some knowledge of the words, are the "matching game" and the "guessing game."  In the matching game, you have eight words on one side in  the target language, and eight in the source language, and you have to move them around until they match up with each other.  In the guessing game, it's basically a multiple choice test.

There's also the "typing game"--but you have to be able to type the diacritical marks for the language to get these to match.  They give you a word in one language and you have to type it in the other language.

Here you get points for playing each game, and you get to compete against others.  But don't bother trying to get the high scores.  Those are all taken by freaks who must use some computer program to score rather than doing it manually (if you play for several hours and do the math, you will see that even going your fastest for 24 hours, it is impossible to match the high score for a day.  But really, what is the point of not doing it yourself?).  They have scores by the day, the week, the month, etc.  You don't have to log in to use the site, but you do if you want to score.  As I've said, I've given up on scoring due to the pointless cheating.

The coolest thing that I find about this site is that you can easily study one language in another language.  You can study Turkish in Spanish, or Polish in French (I've done this, as well as studying Polish in Spanish, and Polish in Dutch), or, as I've been doing lately, Romanian in Polish.  And it is really easy to keep switching around both target and source languages.

University Of Pittsburgh Polish Course Is Awesome

In my last post, I indicated that I wanted to talk about some free Polish resources on the Web.  One of the most super-awesome courses for free that I could imagine is the University of Pittsburgh Polish Course.  There is a plethora of resources there for learning the Polish language.

First of all, they have a Polish Dictionary.  Now this is a great resource, but, personally, I don't use it.  It's not that it isn't useful, and you might find that it can be your go-to resource.  But I'm so tied in to the Anki flash card program that I simply use the deck browser on my Polish flash card deck as my dictionary (I've talked about Anki here and here a little bit but eventually I'll have to have a more detailed description of it in a separate post because it is definitely my favorite flash card resource for multiple languages).

The Polish Dictionary at University of Pittsburgh is only searchable, as far as I can tell...you can't actually browse it.  I may be wrong about that as I've only taken a cursory look at it.  If you know otherwise, feel free to comment.  But there are many more useful features on this site.

First of all, there are a couple of very good reference grammar ebooks on there for free.  The most accessible one is Polish Grammar In A Nutshell.  This is a short summary of some of the most frequently used points of grammar, and is the one that I run to most often to answer quick questions without a huge amount of depth.  But there is also a very comprehensive grammar that is nearly five hundred pages long at this link: A Grammar Of Contemporary Polish.

OK, those are the reference materials that are available on the site.  There are also a series of lessons.  Lessons 1-6 also appear to be contained in Volume One.  There are a couple of other volumes referenced in Volume One but I haven't found them yet.  There appears to be a .pdf dictionary mentioned so it may be on the site somewhere.

There are also a lot of audio files on this site.  I used to come here for some audio files that were in print and audio, but I can't seem to find them any more, and the links to them on the site map don't seem to be currently active.  I'm sure that what they have on there currently is really great.

Also, there are some computer drills that indicate that you have to utilize some program to use.  I'm not sure if you have to install it or if it is on the web.  I haven't really used them or explored through them, but they look very useful.

Keep in mind that this whole site appears to be a work in progress, and changes around.  Things have moved around a lot since I first started going here, so some of the links may change.  You might want to poke around the site some to see how it is organized, but I'm sure you will find some fantastic resources here for learning Polish.

But what I like about this site the most is that it appears to just totally be a labor of giving.  There is no commercial component to it at all.  No ads, no entreaties to buy anything, just rock-solid, useful information.  This is classic 1995 Internet, when we thought the Web would be a big open-source sharing resource, before the bulk of the whole thing became a series of exploitative advertisements/data mining device/malware delivery system/porn site.  See, you can still find the love out there somewhere.

Feel free to comment if you want to add more info about the University of Pittsburgh's site, talk about anything I've left out here, or if things move around and you want to update info.  Or just to ruminate, blather, or say hi.

The Wikipedia Method

Here is how I do the bulk of my reading and translation as part of my process to learn a foreign language:  I use the Wikipedia method.

My Wikipedia method works this way:  First, I will go to the Wikipedia page of the language that I want to study.  For the Polish language, I go to Wikipedia Polski, and pick an article in a subject that interests me.  Of course, I open it in Google Chrome.  Then I open another tab with the same article, and Chrome will ask me if I want to translate it from Polish to English, and I will translate it.  Then I open another tab with Google Translate, set to translate from Polish to English, so I can translate individual words if needed.  Note also that I have added a link to a random article on Polish Wikipedia at the bottom of my blog.

I'll read through the article, and if I come to word(s) that I don't know, then I'll look at the version translated from the target language into English (this is better than looking at the same article in English Wikipedia, because usually that article is completely different, and the translated version is somewhat word-for-word).  Since the translation is sometimes a little off-kilter, if what I see doesn't make sense to me, then I'll go to Google Translate and enter the words one by one.  I have yet to encounter something that is so idiomatic and peculiar that I can't figure out what it means.

It's not as useful to translate from the source language to the target language (for example, if your native language is English, don't use the Chrome browser to translate from English to Polish [or whatever the target language is]). The reason is that the translation will be weird and your native language skills will be better at understanding a strange translation in your native language than in the language you are trying to learn.  Also, you want to look at grammatical and syntactical constructions (as well as translations) that are correct, and even though humans make mistakes, the version written by the person will be more correct than the version that is translated.

But, really, my Wikipedia method could be used with any source material that is in the Polish language.  I use it with Wikipedia the most because then I can learn about cool and interesting stuff too.  News sites and blogs in Polish on subjects that interest you might be particularly suited to this type of endeavor.  The only things that are really important are: 1) that the source code on the page of the site you are translating is not so whacked-out that it won't allow for a translation, or 2) that the site is not heavily dependent on images that deliver text.