Colloquial Polish: The Complete Course for Beginners

by Bolesław W. Mazur

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? 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.

Genres: Polish Literature, Nonfiction, Language, Textbooks, Reference

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Rebecka · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not too bad as a language course, but it has some weak points, such as very confusing gender hints. Instead of indicating whether you are supposed to write sentences as a man or a woman by writing "male"/"female" it switches between "woman"/"she", "man"/"he", which is really confusing sometimes since the gender of the person you are speaking to also affects the verbs and whatnot. Why not just put "I (f) will call you (m) tomorrow"??

At least there's no "How to buy your woman a drink in Polish" part, which I once encountered in (I believe) the Hungarian Assimil... Like all language books, this one does assume the learner is a man, but it does it in a less obvious way.

The audio is also extremely annoying since every track starts with like 15 seconds of blabbering in English, which is absolutely unnecessary. I would have listened to the audio much more if it weren't for the English taking up so much time.

All in all, a decent introduction to Polish. For learners lacking understanding of Slavic grammar it may be a bit difficult though, if you don't repeat the units a lot. It just throws the grammar at you, gives you five sentences to practice with, and moves on. Already knowing at least one Slavic language helps considerably. (Unless that language is like... Bulgarian.)

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, certainly learned some things, mainly insights into when certain constructions were used and formality/register of various words and constructions. However, there were several obvious bumblings in the grammar explanations. Not sure it would be very accessible without prior knowledge.

[Jeanette Sautner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent value, clear descriptions of complex grammatical concepts, useful online resources at no additional cost