Product Description

Colloquial Polish is easy to use and completely up-to-date!

Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Polish. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

What makes this new edition of Colloquial Polish your best choice in personal language learning?

• Interactive – lots of exercises for regular practice.
• Clear – concise grammar notes.
• Practical – useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide.
• Complete – including answer key and reference section.

Whether you’re a business traveller, or about to take up a daring challenge in adventure tourism; you may be studying to teach or even looking forward to a holiday – if you’d like to get up and running with Polish, this rewarding course will take you from complete beginner to confidently putting your language skills to use in a wide range of everyday situations.

Accompanying audio material is available to purchase separately on CDs or in MP3 format, or comes included in the great value Colloquial Polish paperback and CDs complete course. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material complements the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708034 in Books
• Published on:
• Original language: English, Polish
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x .98" w x 5.43" l, 1.20 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Polish

About the Author
Retired; formerly at SSEES, University of London

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
totally awesome
By A Customer
I've been learning Polish for almost two years, but most of the courses I've gone through have been keeping the vocabulary and grammar below the intermediate level and not going beyond that point. Of all the courses I've gotten so far, this is the absolute best. It keeps the language at a level of simplicity that almost everybody who uses it will be able to understand. If you have a sufficient knowledge of how Polish pronunciation works, you might be able to use just the book only. If you don't know the sounds of Polish or are unsure about certain sounds, I'd recommend getting the cassettes that accompany the textbook. (I already had some cassettes for Polish when I bought this course, and I also have a Polish friend who helps me with speaking the language, so I didn't buy the cassettes and can't tell you about their content.) The pronunciation, though at times difficult to enunciate clearly and often frustrating to those who aren't used to the frequent combinations of consonants, is mercifully straightforward and has few exceptions. Once you know how Polish pronunciation works, you can read Polish right off a page. The books details the common exceptions (very few words are read differently than they're spelt orthographically. One tense has a switch of stress, from the penultimate to the antepenultimate), and the grammar is explained clearly. It speaks from a "native-English" point of view so that all native speakers of English can relate the information through the idioms and logic they naturally use. Overall, this is the best book you can buy for learning how to both write and speak Polish. Speaking what you read or hear is the absolute best way to keep your knowledge fresh in your memory. Langenscheidt offers an awesome dictionary which can be used to further your Polish after completing the course. With this dictionary and the course, you should be able to converse with Poles is a short time.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Language learning for intelligent people, not for Pavlov's dog
By musikwissenschaft
This book is light-years better than many of the so-called conversational methods around, such as Pimsleur -- which repeats so often and goes so slowly that one loses all interest -- and unlike those books, it actually teaches grammar, but in a logical order. I have no idea what "Hello Kitty" reviewer could possibly be criticizing: how can one learn a language without learning grammar? (I am a language teacher myself and have taught myself several languages with textbooks. Good language students want to learn grammar!) If one wants actually to understand what one is learning, so that one can freely produce the language oneself rather than mechanically repeating phrases, this is the way to go. It is indeed a book for beginners, but beginners who think, not parrots (which is what many other language tapes are designed for).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Very Good Language Course
By carvelle33
I've been studying Polish for about a year and a half and have gotten to an intermediate proficiency with this book as the keystone of my studying. I have supplemented my use of this book with a couple of other courses when I reached a point where I felt I needed more work on real-time hearing skills or what-have-you. Anyway, this course/book has a very orderly progression both in vocabulary and sentence complexity that builds on past lessons while supplementing them. Proper focus/emphasis is given to the key noun/adjective cases in Polish that are most predominant.

It should be noted that this book definitely goes beyond a course for "beginners" in my opinion. It introduces all 7 cases, both perfective and imperfective verb aspect and all verb tenses in Polish. In other words, it lays the essential groundwork for the language. When you've completed the book (if you've really mastered it), you'll know how to express yourself in Polish in all but rather complex conversations.