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.
Showing posts with label site_review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label site_review. Show all posts
Friday, November 15, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Just Had To Remove A Link To An Infected Site
I just had to remove a link in my list of language learning blogs to a site that is apparently infected with malware. It was called speakingadventure-dot-com (it's spelled out...DON'T GO THERE!!!). I did not click on the link at any time after that site was compromised so I doubt I was infected. The link had been on there for quite some time but the site must have recently gotten infected as Google Chrome would no longer let me on my blog site and gave a malware warning about content from this other site.
Though I could not get to my blog at all, I could get to the maintenance pages, and I just searched all the gadgets for any trace of the site that Chrome was telling me harbored the infection. And, bingo, I found a link to it and just deleted it, resolving the problem in less than ten minutes after getting the warning and being blocked from my site.
So keep in mind that at any moment, any link that you have posted on your site could become infected somehow. Or, even worse, someone could hack into your site and it could become infected as well. Sobering thought.
Whew...I'm glad it was not something more involved, and I'm glad I figured it out quickly.
Though I could not get to my blog at all, I could get to the maintenance pages, and I just searched all the gadgets for any trace of the site that Chrome was telling me harbored the infection. And, bingo, I found a link to it and just deleted it, resolving the problem in less than ten minutes after getting the warning and being blocked from my site.
So keep in mind that at any moment, any link that you have posted on your site could become infected somehow. Or, even worse, someone could hack into your site and it could become infected as well. Sobering thought.
Whew...I'm glad it was not something more involved, and I'm glad I figured it out quickly.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
The New Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary CD Is Problematic
In my post on Polish language learning recommendations, I gave high marks to "The New Kosciuszko Foundation Dictionary," a two-volume set. I do like the book even though it has some omissions of words (but few dictionaries will have all words, and if they do they will be really expensive). I bought this dictionary at a bookstore in Warsaw and it was a little over 300 złoty (about $100 in US money).
But recently I installed the CD that comes with the book, which purports to be a searchable version of both volumes with some added features. The problem with the CD is that it displays the wrong character set, as you can see from the following screenshot:
But not only does it display the wrong characters, the support emails in the help file for the program are not operative any more, so good luck getting any support for the problem or for the program in general. The website has also changed as well. The help file is fairly sparse and does not even address this problem. On the Kosciuszko Foundation's site, it is hard to find any email addresses for anybody, and it is doubtful that anyone there is associated with the dictionary. Still, I have emailed multiple people there about the problem and asked them to forward to the correct person and have not even gotten a response. This is troubling because perhaps someone has an easy answer and it seems I am simply being ignored.
I ran a compatibility check in Windows (you can do this for any program by right-clicking on the program and choosing it from the menu) for the program, and it goes through a series of questions and tests, then ultimately states that the program is incompatible, with no further details. And I've tried running it in emulation modes for previous versions of Windows, and have gotten no better results. And there doesn't seem to be any information on this through any internet searches.
I guess my next step will be to see if there is some sort of emulation window (free, hopefully) I can run this program in to get the right characters. I have also experimented with changing to different character sets in Windows and that doesn't help either. Really, I don't want to globally change my character set because other programs and files are running fine, but I thought I would at least try.
So my recommendation at this point is that the books are good, but the CD leaves something to be desired.
UPDATE: The president of the Kosciuszko Foundation emailed me today and indicated that the company who they partnered with to make the CD has gone out of business, and as soon as they can raise the money to fix the problems with the CD, they will make it right with all the customers who purchased the original ones. So it is somewhat gratifying that (hopefully) they will at some point correct the problem.
UPDATE: Five months later (November 2013), there appears to have been no further attempt to fix this problem or put out any information to offer either any solution, or any progress toward a solution. The CD is a lemon, and customer service is nonexistent. However, the dictionary itself is solid.
But recently I installed the CD that comes with the book, which purports to be a searchable version of both volumes with some added features. The problem with the CD is that it displays the wrong character set, as you can see from the following screenshot:
I ran a compatibility check in Windows (you can do this for any program by right-clicking on the program and choosing it from the menu) for the program, and it goes through a series of questions and tests, then ultimately states that the program is incompatible, with no further details. And I've tried running it in emulation modes for previous versions of Windows, and have gotten no better results. And there doesn't seem to be any information on this through any internet searches.
I guess my next step will be to see if there is some sort of emulation window (free, hopefully) I can run this program in to get the right characters. I have also experimented with changing to different character sets in Windows and that doesn't help either. Really, I don't want to globally change my character set because other programs and files are running fine, but I thought I would at least try.
So my recommendation at this point is that the books are good, but the CD leaves something to be desired.
UPDATE: The president of the Kosciuszko Foundation emailed me today and indicated that the company who they partnered with to make the CD has gone out of business, and as soon as they can raise the money to fix the problems with the CD, they will make it right with all the customers who purchased the original ones. So it is somewhat gratifying that (hopefully) they will at some point correct the problem.
UPDATE: Five months later (November 2013), there appears to have been no further attempt to fix this problem or put out any information to offer either any solution, or any progress toward a solution. The CD is a lemon, and customer service is nonexistent. However, the dictionary itself is solid.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, May 27, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
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:
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.
Wikibooks has a series that shows some tables with example nouns and their declensions. There are three different pages, one for each gender:
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.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Review: Babbel.com
OK, first a couple of disclaimers. I'm using Babbel to study German, not Polish. So the experience may be slightly different for Polish, but I'm guessing it is about the same or pretty close. I figured I have plenty of resources for Polish (but would have checked out Polish here if they threw it in along with another language), enough stuff for Dutch, my own resources for Romanian (not much on the Web as it is a fairly minor language), am working with Anki for French, Italian and German, so I figured now is a good time to expand my knowledge of German. The second disclaimer is that I have only gone through a few lessons and spot-checked some others.
The site is not bad, but it moves along really slowly. It's probably good for somebody who is just starting out learning a language, but for voracious multi-lingual information processing people, it's going to move at a glacial pace. What we want is massive amounts of information coming in rapidly and then to know that some of it will stick to the wall and some of it will splatter off or slide downward and we can go back to it. Vocabulary comes in fairly slowly (just a few words a lesson), but to its credit, it is presented with simple sentences in context that are fairly easily decoded. There is not much discussion of grammar (there are a few grammar exercises, but you really don't get your hands dirty) and not a lot of oral usage other than repetition of the sentences.
There are a lot of matching exercises. I'm not a huge fan of matching exercises, but I guess they are OK as an introduction. Also, there are exercises where you have to type the names of what you are translating, and it takes off points if you make a typo while you are typing instead of grading the whole thing after you have typed it. So you have to be very careful typing. It does put in diacriticals (accent marks or special marks) automatically and you don't have to type some special keyboard. The good: it saves you time. The bad: you might not get the best knowledge of where the diacriticals are and aren't supposed to be. On the whole, though, I prefer them being put in without having to type them specially.
As you complete exercises, you earn "Babbel Points." But I can't find any explanation anywhere of what this means or what the points signify or do. It would be helpful if this was explained in the FAQ section.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of advanced material, though there is some. I would guess this is because most language learners are beginners. Probably some of the best stuff is in the course group called "Specials". You can review at an A2 level, and there are also some exercises on idioms and false friends. There are some more advanced narratives in the "Business" part of the language.
The first lesson in any given language is free so you can try it out, and then you have to pay to access the rest. I got in on a half-off deal, or rather, six months for the price of three. Six months is a good length of time to check something out so I'll probably report back again at the end of that period. You have to pay extra if you want another language. Of course, that is reasonable. But I'd like to see one of these multi-lingual pay sites offer a little of all their languages for a short period so you can try it out. Hardly ever do any of them do that, though.
One thing that turned me off is that the first lesson on "Animals" is "Animal Sounds." Who is ever going to need to communicate how to anthopomorphize a dog's bark or a cow's moo in a different language? That is pretty low on the priority list and should be the last lesson if at all. That is one thing that I learned from buying children's books in Poland. At first, I thought that children's books would help me learn like a child does. But then I realized that they talk about things that are really not high on a traveler's priority list whereas language courses think more about that. I really need to know how to ask where the bathroom is when I'm doing a pee dance. Or I need to know where to get food when I'm hungry, money when I need to buy something, a hostel when I need to crash, etc. Priorities need to be considered.
Another drawback is you have to email them to stop your subscription. I really don't like automatic renewals on anything. You have to give them a credit card number and then they charge you automatically. That's OK if you are certain you will keep on using it for a while (well, not really, because at some point you might not). But to add the added step of not being able to unsubscribe on the website and see that you are unsubscribed, and having to contact someone who works there so you can beg off from further payment, that's another layer of jerkdom.
Also, they sent me a survey recently and there were only two choices on everything, either I really love it or it is crappy (whatever feature they were asking me about). I rated almost everything poorly because they didn't give me more choices, but I might have gone a little higher if there had been more than two choices.
One peculiarity is that when viewing the site in Google Chrome (I prefer Chrome for language learning because of its translation features), it tells you that the site is in Spanish, and asks if you want to translate it from Spanish. There was no Spanish at all on any of the pages, just German and English. Maybe some of the HTML or programming comments are in Spanish, who knows. If you hit the button to "translate", nothing happens, but the dialog goes away.
I'm not going to tell you not to use this, but in my opinion, there is better stuff out there. If you get a deal on it (I paid a little over $25 for six months), it is probably not bad for the value. My general rule of thumb is that anything that gives you a deal for under ten bucks a month is worth trying out for a month or two if it looks like it could work. Six months is probably a longer tryout than I would usually go for, but the price was good. It won't hurt me to have a half a year of exposure to German, though I don't think I'll do it every day to wring my usage out of it like I have with other trials in the past.
The site is not bad, but it moves along really slowly. It's probably good for somebody who is just starting out learning a language, but for voracious multi-lingual information processing people, it's going to move at a glacial pace. What we want is massive amounts of information coming in rapidly and then to know that some of it will stick to the wall and some of it will splatter off or slide downward and we can go back to it. Vocabulary comes in fairly slowly (just a few words a lesson), but to its credit, it is presented with simple sentences in context that are fairly easily decoded. There is not much discussion of grammar (there are a few grammar exercises, but you really don't get your hands dirty) and not a lot of oral usage other than repetition of the sentences.
There are a lot of matching exercises. I'm not a huge fan of matching exercises, but I guess they are OK as an introduction. Also, there are exercises where you have to type the names of what you are translating, and it takes off points if you make a typo while you are typing instead of grading the whole thing after you have typed it. So you have to be very careful typing. It does put in diacriticals (accent marks or special marks) automatically and you don't have to type some special keyboard. The good: it saves you time. The bad: you might not get the best knowledge of where the diacriticals are and aren't supposed to be. On the whole, though, I prefer them being put in without having to type them specially.
As you complete exercises, you earn "Babbel Points." But I can't find any explanation anywhere of what this means or what the points signify or do. It would be helpful if this was explained in the FAQ section.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of advanced material, though there is some. I would guess this is because most language learners are beginners. Probably some of the best stuff is in the course group called "Specials". You can review at an A2 level, and there are also some exercises on idioms and false friends. There are some more advanced narratives in the "Business" part of the language.
The first lesson in any given language is free so you can try it out, and then you have to pay to access the rest. I got in on a half-off deal, or rather, six months for the price of three. Six months is a good length of time to check something out so I'll probably report back again at the end of that period. You have to pay extra if you want another language. Of course, that is reasonable. But I'd like to see one of these multi-lingual pay sites offer a little of all their languages for a short period so you can try it out. Hardly ever do any of them do that, though.
One thing that turned me off is that the first lesson on "Animals" is "Animal Sounds." Who is ever going to need to communicate how to anthopomorphize a dog's bark or a cow's moo in a different language? That is pretty low on the priority list and should be the last lesson if at all. That is one thing that I learned from buying children's books in Poland. At first, I thought that children's books would help me learn like a child does. But then I realized that they talk about things that are really not high on a traveler's priority list whereas language courses think more about that. I really need to know how to ask where the bathroom is when I'm doing a pee dance. Or I need to know where to get food when I'm hungry, money when I need to buy something, a hostel when I need to crash, etc. Priorities need to be considered.
Another drawback is you have to email them to stop your subscription. I really don't like automatic renewals on anything. You have to give them a credit card number and then they charge you automatically. That's OK if you are certain you will keep on using it for a while (well, not really, because at some point you might not). But to add the added step of not being able to unsubscribe on the website and see that you are unsubscribed, and having to contact someone who works there so you can beg off from further payment, that's another layer of jerkdom.
Also, they sent me a survey recently and there were only two choices on everything, either I really love it or it is crappy (whatever feature they were asking me about). I rated almost everything poorly because they didn't give me more choices, but I might have gone a little higher if there had been more than two choices.
One peculiarity is that when viewing the site in Google Chrome (I prefer Chrome for language learning because of its translation features), it tells you that the site is in Spanish, and asks if you want to translate it from Spanish. There was no Spanish at all on any of the pages, just German and English. Maybe some of the HTML or programming comments are in Spanish, who knows. If you hit the button to "translate", nothing happens, but the dialog goes away.
I'm not going to tell you not to use this, but in my opinion, there is better stuff out there. If you get a deal on it (I paid a little over $25 for six months), it is probably not bad for the value. My general rule of thumb is that anything that gives you a deal for under ten bucks a month is worth trying out for a month or two if it looks like it could work. Six months is probably a longer tryout than I would usually go for, but the price was good. It won't hurt me to have a half a year of exposure to German, though I don't think I'll do it every day to wring my usage out of it like I have with other trials in the past.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Real Polish As A Learning Resource
One good learning resource for those who want short audio blurbs with written narrative is Real Polish. Though the narrative is only in Polish, it is easy to use what I call the Wikipedia Method--one opens the Polish narrative in two tabs in Google Chrome, and translates one into English. You can also purchase materials from the site that include more material...I haven't personally purchased the materials, so I'm not quite sure what value is added from the premium stuff.
But the free material on there is pretty decent. There are a lot of short blurbs with audio, which is an important part of learning a new language. Audio with accompanying transcription is hard to come by sometimes.
I have gone through some of the narratives, and found them interesting and valuable educationally. This is not one of my main sources of learning only because I have become reliant on other things. But I do rotate it in occasionally and can see how it is helpful. Perhaps at some point I might possibly utilize it more.
But the free material on there is pretty decent. There are a lot of short blurbs with audio, which is an important part of learning a new language. Audio with accompanying transcription is hard to come by sometimes.
I have gone through some of the narratives, and found them interesting and valuable educationally. This is not one of my main sources of learning only because I have become reliant on other things. But I do rotate it in occasionally and can see how it is helpful. Perhaps at some point I might possibly utilize it more.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
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.
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.
, 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.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, December 21, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Too Busy, And Checking Out Innovative Language's Thing
I've been meaning to write another post for a few days, but I've been awfully busy. If you've noticed the widgets I placed on the right side of my blog a few days ago--the ones that give a "word of the day" for Polish, Dutch and Romanian--they click through to some language learning sites run by Innovative Learning.
Anyway, I not only took advantage of the 7-day free trial for the Polish site, but also paid five bucks on a flash deal that was available for 24 hours to sign up for any language site for a month. So I picked Dutch, plunked down my five bucks, and now I have access to the site for a month.
I have to say that having experienced a lot of modes of learning languages, I like their methods, for the most part. With Polish, I have been going through the beginning lessons kind of randomly but find that I know almost all the vocabulary words and can translate the Polish in the lessons relatively easily, for the most part. The advanced lessons, though, have been really helpful, and fairly interesting. Each of the advanced audio lessons is a very brief essay on a topic of Polish life. There is a series on different Polish cities, and one on different regions in Poland, than on Polish movies and Polish musicians. In each series there is an essay of about five hundred words for each lesson in Polish, and then the translation in English. On the premium level, you also get the essay broken down in audio segments sentence by sentence. It's hard for me to see yet what you get for free because you automatically get the 7-day free trial of the premium level. So I've been furiously trying to pack as much in to the 7-day trial as I can get. I probably won't pay for more unless I get addicted like it was crack, which I could easily see happening. But I'm a cheap bastard, so probably not. Maybe if it pops up with some super-cheap deal for a month or three, I'll bite.
The prices are just a little too high for me. It's twenty-five bucks a month, but the prices drop drastically if you buy in for a year or two. The rub there is that you don't want to pay for a year not knowing if you would maintain use of it, or get tired of their system and need to change it around. But the five-bucks-for-a-month Dutch deal was a good offer, so I took that. I'll see how much I can get out of that. I'm not as proficient at Dutch, so the beginner lessons are more helpful to me and I have to go through them slower.
Now I would maybe be more likely to bite if they offered me the chance to check out all the languages they offer for the prices, so I could jump around from language to language. I'd maybe even lock in for a year. But each language is separate and has its own site, and you have to pay for each one separately. They don't seem to group them together in any way for a better deal, and even if they did, you can only study so much in one day, so paying twice as much for two languages or eight times as much for eight languages doesn't do you a lot of good.
For Polish the link is http://www.polishpod101.com, for Dutch it is http://www.dutchpod101.com, etc. Some languages have "class" instead of "pod" in their names (I guess the domain was taken?).
The flash cards are cool because you can customize them in different ways to study from the lessons you are looking at, or from words you have added to a "wordbank", and they automatically come with audio, which I don't have in any of my current flash cards on Anki (though Anki does have the capability to add audio, and I think there is also a plug-in for it that will send the text on your flash card to Google text-to-speech or another TTS app; I just haven't had the time to check it out and figure out how to configure it).
Anyway, like I said, I've been working my ass off trying to get the most out of my 7-day free trial in Polish and 30-day five-buck deal in Dutch in the allotted time, so more later. I do like the system they have.
Anyway, I not only took advantage of the 7-day free trial for the Polish site, but also paid five bucks on a flash deal that was available for 24 hours to sign up for any language site for a month. So I picked Dutch, plunked down my five bucks, and now I have access to the site for a month.
I have to say that having experienced a lot of modes of learning languages, I like their methods, for the most part. With Polish, I have been going through the beginning lessons kind of randomly but find that I know almost all the vocabulary words and can translate the Polish in the lessons relatively easily, for the most part. The advanced lessons, though, have been really helpful, and fairly interesting. Each of the advanced audio lessons is a very brief essay on a topic of Polish life. There is a series on different Polish cities, and one on different regions in Poland, than on Polish movies and Polish musicians. In each series there is an essay of about five hundred words for each lesson in Polish, and then the translation in English. On the premium level, you also get the essay broken down in audio segments sentence by sentence. It's hard for me to see yet what you get for free because you automatically get the 7-day free trial of the premium level. So I've been furiously trying to pack as much in to the 7-day trial as I can get. I probably won't pay for more unless I get addicted like it was crack, which I could easily see happening. But I'm a cheap bastard, so probably not. Maybe if it pops up with some super-cheap deal for a month or three, I'll bite.
The prices are just a little too high for me. It's twenty-five bucks a month, but the prices drop drastically if you buy in for a year or two. The rub there is that you don't want to pay for a year not knowing if you would maintain use of it, or get tired of their system and need to change it around. But the five-bucks-for-a-month Dutch deal was a good offer, so I took that. I'll see how much I can get out of that. I'm not as proficient at Dutch, so the beginner lessons are more helpful to me and I have to go through them slower.
Now I would maybe be more likely to bite if they offered me the chance to check out all the languages they offer for the prices, so I could jump around from language to language. I'd maybe even lock in for a year. But each language is separate and has its own site, and you have to pay for each one separately. They don't seem to group them together in any way for a better deal, and even if they did, you can only study so much in one day, so paying twice as much for two languages or eight times as much for eight languages doesn't do you a lot of good.
For Polish the link is http://www.polishpod101.com, for Dutch it is http://www.dutchpod101.com, etc. Some languages have "class" instead of "pod" in their names (I guess the domain was taken?).
The flash cards are cool because you can customize them in different ways to study from the lessons you are looking at, or from words you have added to a "wordbank", and they automatically come with audio, which I don't have in any of my current flash cards on Anki (though Anki does have the capability to add audio, and I think there is also a plug-in for it that will send the text on your flash card to Google text-to-speech or another TTS app; I just haven't had the time to check it out and figure out how to configure it).
Anyway, like I said, I've been working my ass off trying to get the most out of my 7-day free trial in Polish and 30-day five-buck deal in Dutch in the allotted time, so more later. I do like the system they have.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Rosetta Stone Is Overpriced Garbage
There, I said it. Rosetta Stone is overpriced garbage.
Obviously, I'm not a shill for Rosetta Stone. Obviously I'm not paid to tell you how friggin' wonderful it is, and how it's the best thing since the invention of the wheel.
I mean, what the hell? This crap costs, like, four hundred dollars. And the price is always three hundred dollars off from some imaginary "actual retail" that nobody ever truly pays (god, at least I really hope not). A reasonable price for what you get would be about fifty dollars. I'd maybe pay that, despite its shortcomings, which I'll most certainly let you know about. It doesn't give you ANY translations, just pictures of stuff and people yapping in a foreign language you don't know yet. Often the pictures are confusing and ambiguous, and they are never in any way associated with the culture that goes with the language you are learning.
And for this exorbitant price, they give you TWO installs. Here's the story of my first and probably only experience with it. I got suckered in for nearly five hundred bucks for Polish 1,2 and 3 (so is it telling that it's already gone down about a hundred bucks since I bought it?). I installed it on my desktop at the time, and the hard disk promptly fried. So I spent a half an hour on the phone with a tech support person whose native language did not seem to be English (but wouldn't let on what it was), and seemed to have an IQ of about eighty. I begged for another install, but instead, they insisted that I should install my second and final install. Once I got another machine, I installed the second install. Of course, the motherboard fried on this computer. Now I'm completely shit out of luck. I haven't bothered to call tech support because, frankly, I'm just disgusted with myself for getting fleeced on this product in the first place. Also I've read online that they just blow you off if you are beyond the initial six-month guarantee period (which I am).
A while back, they ran these commercials with Michael Phelps, talking about what a wonderful experience he had learning Chinese with Rosetta Stone. I was dumbstruck by the fact that in the commercials, he utters NOT A SINGLE WORD of the language. C'mon, people, at least fake a few lines for effect...is that too much to ask? So it's making me think that it's just another case of an overpaid lying celebrity selling garbage as gold. If you're going to pay some shiny face a gazillion dollars to invade everybody's livingroom to baffle them with bullshit so you can switch on the cash vacuum, at least toss in a couple of fucking token dance steps. Also, for the cost they probably paid Michael Phelps to dance this jig, they conceivably could have cut the price in half (and undoubtedly would have sold more units as a result) But, of course, long before this time, I've already purchased this trash.
OK, I will admit it has some actual educational value. There is a smidgen of lipstick on this pig somewhere (but nowhere near the lips). And that's why I'd consider paying fifty bucks for some Rosetta Stone in some other language at some point. Maybe. But not until I've gotten my dead Polish software that I paid through the nose for to work again.
Obviously, I'm not a shill for Rosetta Stone. Obviously I'm not paid to tell you how friggin' wonderful it is, and how it's the best thing since the invention of the wheel.
I mean, what the hell? This crap costs, like, four hundred dollars. And the price is always three hundred dollars off from some imaginary "actual retail" that nobody ever truly pays (god, at least I really hope not). A reasonable price for what you get would be about fifty dollars. I'd maybe pay that, despite its shortcomings, which I'll most certainly let you know about. It doesn't give you ANY translations, just pictures of stuff and people yapping in a foreign language you don't know yet. Often the pictures are confusing and ambiguous, and they are never in any way associated with the culture that goes with the language you are learning.
And for this exorbitant price, they give you TWO installs. Here's the story of my first and probably only experience with it. I got suckered in for nearly five hundred bucks for Polish 1,2 and 3 (so is it telling that it's already gone down about a hundred bucks since I bought it?). I installed it on my desktop at the time, and the hard disk promptly fried. So I spent a half an hour on the phone with a tech support person whose native language did not seem to be English (but wouldn't let on what it was), and seemed to have an IQ of about eighty. I begged for another install, but instead, they insisted that I should install my second and final install. Once I got another machine, I installed the second install. Of course, the motherboard fried on this computer. Now I'm completely shit out of luck. I haven't bothered to call tech support because, frankly, I'm just disgusted with myself for getting fleeced on this product in the first place. Also I've read online that they just blow you off if you are beyond the initial six-month guarantee period (which I am).
A while back, they ran these commercials with Michael Phelps, talking about what a wonderful experience he had learning Chinese with Rosetta Stone. I was dumbstruck by the fact that in the commercials, he utters NOT A SINGLE WORD of the language. C'mon, people, at least fake a few lines for effect...is that too much to ask? So it's making me think that it's just another case of an overpaid lying celebrity selling garbage as gold. If you're going to pay some shiny face a gazillion dollars to invade everybody's livingroom to baffle them with bullshit so you can switch on the cash vacuum, at least toss in a couple of fucking token dance steps. Also, for the cost they probably paid Michael Phelps to dance this jig, they conceivably could have cut the price in half (and undoubtedly would have sold more units as a result) But, of course, long before this time, I've already purchased this trash.
OK, I will admit it has some actual educational value. There is a smidgen of lipstick on this pig somewhere (but nowhere near the lips). And that's why I'd consider paying fifty bucks for some Rosetta Stone in some other language at some point. Maybe. But not until I've gotten my dead Polish software that I paid through the nose for to work again.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Trifecta!
Here are the three fects of my current linguistic odyssey:
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.
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.
Friday, November 9, 2012
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.
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.
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