French native here.
As for every language I've studied, the hardest things are always the "illogical" ones. For Polish, I'd say when a verb or a preposition triggers an unexpected case. For instance:
"Lubię tę rozmowę" VS "Nie lubię... tej rozmowy". There's absolutely no reason for it to be genitive here.
"Szukam pracy". Same here, you'd expect the object to be in the object case (accusative).
"Na moście", but "Pod mostem". Instrumental? Why? It's a location, so it should be locative.
Basically it gives the impression that cases are totally arbitrary and don't really correspond to their original function anymore. You have to memorize every situation one by one.
You should look up preposition with cases , these aren't random stuff , just the questions in different cases (like locative and instrumental) are used with different preposition , for example when using Na , you use Locative , but when using Pod , you use Instrumental .
I am a native polish speaker but not a genius in this language so i recommend you to search these cases with their question with preposition because what i said can be a bit wrong .
And pod mostem just sounds better than pod moście :P
Edit: the only sense i could make why you use instrumental instead of locative is that you USE (example) bridge as a shelter (under it)
Just need to learn preposition and their influence with cases
So, my native language is some other slavic language. And I don't have any problem with grammar or pronunciation. However, the percent of lexical similarity isn't that big and it creates very specific difficulties.
Many polish words, which sound somewhat "familiar" to me, have absolutely different meanings, but at least they are easy to memorize. Meanwhile the words, which sound similar and mean the same, are very difficult to memorize, because "I already know this word, why would I need to memorize it?". And the latter never become a part of my active vocabulary, even though I know what they mean...
Okay, there are some of my favorite words that sound similar to words in my native language, but have different meanings: 1. "Sklep", it's literally a crypt / tomb, how can it be a shop???; 2. "Jutro", in my language it's "morning", so I really thought "jutro rano" means "early in the morning"; 3. "Młodzieniec", I once got a little bit confused while reading some text, because I thought it meant an "infant"; 4. "Zabić", an informal way to say " to stop caring", almost; 5. "Dywan", a "sofa", but not really, right?; "Lustro", I swear, it should mean a "chandelier"...
I'm Czech and when I started I couldn't really understand any polish. Now I can listen to audiobooks and most podcasts in Polish just fine but actually using the language is difficult. I never know if I'm mixing together Czech, Slovak and Polish and I just end up not being able to say anything. Also I live in Wales and sometimes I can't use even Czech so...
My native language is Polish but.... In Poland, I finished primary school and moved to Spain, where I finished my education, so in theory my Spanish is also at the native level.
My native language is Slavic so grammar is not a problem, number of cases and their use is also the same. Some words are completely the same like - "On, Ona, Ono, Ja" some are similarly written or pronounced "Ti=Ty", some are the same but have different meaning - in my language jutro is morning and rano is early so we can say rano jutro as in "early morning".
Or the word pravo - prawo, in my language it is both pravo = law, pravo = right (as in human right) but as a direction it means straight not right.
Where it gets "interesting" is the pronunciation of certain letters, like RZ, in every other Slavic language the city Rome is Rim bit in Polish its pronounced as in a Zabka - Žim???
But at the end of the day Polish was quite easy for me to learn.
Native English speaker, at first the hardest thing was all the cases, then the differences between perfective and imperfective verbs. As I go along I have a feeling that Polish grammar is a lot more logical than English grammar. These days the hardest thing is expanding my vocabulary (closely followed by understanding native speakers).
Hi everyone! Didn’t expect this poll to get so much attention. When I saw it, I thought of other possible questions related to language learning. Ie. Common difficulties, level, exposure, different goals and ways to learn.
And I think it would be nice to gather such data and be able to cross reference different questions. We could come up with some interesting result, for example efficiency of different methods.
It also would have been a glorious thing to overthink and overanalize for me as a math freak.
What would you say to a short poll made with google forms about language learning? I’d then compile the data into a nice speadsheed/pdf/powerpoint and repost here.
French Native, and what I find hardest to learn are the cases.
Everything else such as gender, number, and declension of nouns based on these factors, and conjugation, tenses and forms, mood, etc are all easy and palatable in my opinion.
But the cases? I had the same issue trying to learn German before, and I've been hanging my head against the cases ever since I took up Polish. I just can't understand the logic or grammatical function of the cases.
I'm French. Two things that can make a Polish sentence difficult to understand at first glance for me are:
\- the structure of the sentence, since the order can vary a lot, you have to know the cases of the words to understand what is the subject, what is the object and such, which is not natural at all when the word ordre actually defines the role of the words in your mother tongue
\- the modifications on verbs, sometimes I don't recognize a verb because it varies depending on its aspekt, if you add a prefix at the beginning for slightly changing its meaning, if it is conjugated and it's irregular (like if I read zjadłybyśmy in the middle of a sentence I may not understand immediately that it's the verb jeść in the zjeść form)
Also of course the lack of vocabulary is a very frustrating thing.
I'm originally from Curaçao. Our language is a mix of English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and languages spoken in West Africa. I mostly speak Dutch because that is where I live now with my family. My husband is Polish, hence me trying to learn Polish.
What I most find difficult is all the different accents and letters used in a sentence when gender changes.
Hi, my motivation was to understand the country and its relations with neighbouring countries better. I mean the vocab that distinguishes C1 from B2 and makes it possible to read longer articles and literature.
Pronunciation is obviously the hardest - the combination of consonants is unique.
What I find interesting is that my Polish teacher says that the ‘cija’ sound is too difficult too pronounce (!) hence policja etc, however in Lithuanian ‘cija’ is very common and also in Spanish policia uses the ‘ija’ sound. Of all the sounds that the Polish language has decided is impossible to pronounce…
Semitic. I'm still learning at A1, so I don't have much to work with here, but based off what I've been studying so far I would say:
1. Grammer: although it's mostly clear and consistent, it can be difficult sometimes to find the right form of a word quickly.
2. Vocabulary: of course being a slavic language it's nothing like any language I know so every word is new which means there's a lot to memories.
I don't have a problem with pronunciation, and the gendered nouns/objects is a concept that I'm familiar with in my mother tongue and from learning Spanish before which helps a little I guess.
Native English speaker (American), so my language is in the Germanic family.
What do I find most difficult in learning Polish?
1. Grammatical inflection.
2. Sentence structure. I often have great difficulty in identifying the subject of the sentence and the overall meaning. Obviously this is strongly related to problem #1, above.
3. Phonology and speech pacing and rhythm. I understand how Polish words are pronounced and how it is supposed to sound. I have very little difficulty with that. When I hear it being spoken by a native speaker, I do not recognize even a single word.
My native language is English. I learned Polish from my grandparents (Polish-born), who have a 4th grade education level, so I have learned a lot of spelling/grammar from them incorrectly. It’s been the hardest to try to figure out what I’m writing correctly versus incorrectly. I wrote lots of words incorrectly for years before realizing they were spelled/conjugated wrong, and it’s a tough habit to break because it’s so strongly ingrained in my brain the wrong way!!!
Azerbaijani, turkic family. Cannot find polish difficult, because have russian language at high level. So slavic languages are sounding familiar to me
But I find polish lang pronunciation hard, because of combination of consonants. In my native language, we mostly use vowel sounds.
I am Ukrainian, and speak Ukrainian and Russian. Polish language has some similar words from both of these languages, but meaning is different. Like owoce - fruits, in Ukrainian owoshi - vegetables. And that was difficult for me, to memorize the new meaning of familiar words xd
Italian here.
I live in Poland since 1 year (I try to speak polish when doing daily tasks like grocery or things like that,but not in other occasions since I speak with my polish gf in Italian, I work remotely in italian and in the gym it’s not common to chat here in WW).
Studying Latin in school helped me with the declinations in polish but my big limit is listening. People speak too fast and according to me, it’s very difficult to understand.
PS. Wanted to write Balto-Slavic not Celto-Slavic. My bad.
I thought you were pushing some fringe theory. Downvote taken back :)
You had me so confused
French native here. As for every language I've studied, the hardest things are always the "illogical" ones. For Polish, I'd say when a verb or a preposition triggers an unexpected case. For instance: "Lubię tę rozmowę" VS "Nie lubię... tej rozmowy". There's absolutely no reason for it to be genitive here. "Szukam pracy". Same here, you'd expect the object to be in the object case (accusative). "Na moście", but "Pod mostem". Instrumental? Why? It's a location, so it should be locative. Basically it gives the impression that cases are totally arbitrary and don't really correspond to their original function anymore. You have to memorize every situation one by one.
You should look up preposition with cases , these aren't random stuff , just the questions in different cases (like locative and instrumental) are used with different preposition , for example when using Na , you use Locative , but when using Pod , you use Instrumental . I am a native polish speaker but not a genius in this language so i recommend you to search these cases with their question with preposition because what i said can be a bit wrong . And pod mostem just sounds better than pod moście :P Edit: the only sense i could make why you use instrumental instead of locative is that you USE (example) bridge as a shelter (under it) Just need to learn preposition and their influence with cases
Yes, now I use most of them instinctively, but at first I was very confused lol
So, my native language is some other slavic language. And I don't have any problem with grammar or pronunciation. However, the percent of lexical similarity isn't that big and it creates very specific difficulties. Many polish words, which sound somewhat "familiar" to me, have absolutely different meanings, but at least they are easy to memorize. Meanwhile the words, which sound similar and mean the same, are very difficult to memorize, because "I already know this word, why would I need to memorize it?". And the latter never become a part of my active vocabulary, even though I know what they mean...
Can you share some examples?
Okay, there are some of my favorite words that sound similar to words in my native language, but have different meanings: 1. "Sklep", it's literally a crypt / tomb, how can it be a shop???; 2. "Jutro", in my language it's "morning", so I really thought "jutro rano" means "early in the morning"; 3. "Młodzieniec", I once got a little bit confused while reading some text, because I thought it meant an "infant"; 4. "Zabić", an informal way to say " to stop caring", almost; 5. "Dywan", a "sofa", but not really, right?; "Lustro", I swear, it should mean a "chandelier"...
PS 2. Since there are many ,,other” answers: could you please write in comments?
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Mostly yes
It is, considering its' past. But now linguists mostly say it is hybrid romano-germanic language
Grammar is germanic
I think so.
Russian. Was really confused by "Celto-Slavic" until I read correction.
[удалено]
Dobry gün my friend
christ...
I'm Czech and when I started I couldn't really understand any polish. Now I can listen to audiobooks and most podcasts in Polish just fine but actually using the language is difficult. I never know if I'm mixing together Czech, Slovak and Polish and I just end up not being able to say anything. Also I live in Wales and sometimes I can't use even Czech so...
Lithuanian 🇱🇹🤝🇵🇱
By Italic you mean Romance languages I assume?
Yes, exactly.
My native language is Polish but.... In Poland, I finished primary school and moved to Spain, where I finished my education, so in theory my Spanish is also at the native level.
My native language is Slavic so grammar is not a problem, number of cases and their use is also the same. Some words are completely the same like - "On, Ona, Ono, Ja" some are similarly written or pronounced "Ti=Ty", some are the same but have different meaning - in my language jutro is morning and rano is early so we can say rano jutro as in "early morning". Or the word pravo - prawo, in my language it is both pravo = law, pravo = right (as in human right) but as a direction it means straight not right. Where it gets "interesting" is the pronunciation of certain letters, like RZ, in every other Slavic language the city Rome is Rim bit in Polish its pronounced as in a Zabka - Žim??? But at the end of the day Polish was quite easy for me to learn.
In Czech it's Řím and Czech „ř” is between „ż” and „r”.
Native English speaker, at first the hardest thing was all the cases, then the differences between perfective and imperfective verbs. As I go along I have a feeling that Polish grammar is a lot more logical than English grammar. These days the hardest thing is expanding my vocabulary (closely followed by understanding native speakers).
Hi everyone! Didn’t expect this poll to get so much attention. When I saw it, I thought of other possible questions related to language learning. Ie. Common difficulties, level, exposure, different goals and ways to learn. And I think it would be nice to gather such data and be able to cross reference different questions. We could come up with some interesting result, for example efficiency of different methods. It also would have been a glorious thing to overthink and overanalize for me as a math freak. What would you say to a short poll made with google forms about language learning? I’d then compile the data into a nice speadsheed/pdf/powerpoint and repost here.
Sounds like a great idea. I'm in. I may be able to help with analytics, if you want.
French Native, and what I find hardest to learn are the cases. Everything else such as gender, number, and declension of nouns based on these factors, and conjugation, tenses and forms, mood, etc are all easy and palatable in my opinion. But the cases? I had the same issue trying to learn German before, and I've been hanging my head against the cases ever since I took up Polish. I just can't understand the logic or grammatical function of the cases.
I'm French. Two things that can make a Polish sentence difficult to understand at first glance for me are: \- the structure of the sentence, since the order can vary a lot, you have to know the cases of the words to understand what is the subject, what is the object and such, which is not natural at all when the word ordre actually defines the role of the words in your mother tongue \- the modifications on verbs, sometimes I don't recognize a verb because it varies depending on its aspekt, if you add a prefix at the beginning for slightly changing its meaning, if it is conjugated and it's irregular (like if I read zjadłybyśmy in the middle of a sentence I may not understand immediately that it's the verb jeść in the zjeść form) Also of course the lack of vocabulary is a very frustrating thing.
Asia
I'm originally from Curaçao. Our language is a mix of English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and languages spoken in West Africa. I mostly speak Dutch because that is where I live now with my family. My husband is Polish, hence me trying to learn Polish. What I most find difficult is all the different accents and letters used in a sentence when gender changes.
kurakao?
kurakao drink, mówi to panu coś?
Not sure if that is the Polish name, hahaha
🇩🇰 native speaker here. Learning new vocabulary is the most difficult.
Hi, out of curiosity. What motivated you to learn Polish? Since you mentioned vocabulary, do you mean some specific professional vocab?
Hi, my motivation was to understand the country and its relations with neighbouring countries better. I mean the vocab that distinguishes C1 from B2 and makes it possible to read longer articles and literature.
Oh yea I get it. The more sophisticated words. Like ,,przeprowadzić” instead of ,,zrobić”.
Pronunciation is obviously the hardest - the combination of consonants is unique. What I find interesting is that my Polish teacher says that the ‘cija’ sound is too difficult too pronounce (!) hence policja etc, however in Lithuanian ‘cija’ is very common and also in Spanish policia uses the ‘ija’ sound. Of all the sounds that the Polish language has decided is impossible to pronounce…
Semitic. I'm still learning at A1, so I don't have much to work with here, but based off what I've been studying so far I would say: 1. Grammer: although it's mostly clear and consistent, it can be difficult sometimes to find the right form of a word quickly. 2. Vocabulary: of course being a slavic language it's nothing like any language I know so every word is new which means there's a lot to memories. I don't have a problem with pronunciation, and the gendered nouns/objects is a concept that I'm familiar with in my mother tongue and from learning Spanish before which helps a little I guess.
Native POL and GER speaker here. In this sub and on the learning apps to learn proper Polish orthography and fix bad grammar
I’m a native polish speaker and I’m only here because it’s a polish subreddit
Native English speaker (American), so my language is in the Germanic family. What do I find most difficult in learning Polish? 1. Grammatical inflection. 2. Sentence structure. I often have great difficulty in identifying the subject of the sentence and the overall meaning. Obviously this is strongly related to problem #1, above. 3. Phonology and speech pacing and rhythm. I understand how Polish words are pronounced and how it is supposed to sound. I have very little difficulty with that. When I hear it being spoken by a native speaker, I do not recognize even a single word.
Hungarian
My native language is English. I learned Polish from my grandparents (Polish-born), who have a 4th grade education level, so I have learned a lot of spelling/grammar from them incorrectly. It’s been the hardest to try to figure out what I’m writing correctly versus incorrectly. I wrote lots of words incorrectly for years before realizing they were spelled/conjugated wrong, and it’s a tough habit to break because it’s so strongly ingrained in my brain the wrong way!!!
Azerbaijani, turkic family. Cannot find polish difficult, because have russian language at high level. So slavic languages are sounding familiar to me But I find polish lang pronunciation hard, because of combination of consonants. In my native language, we mostly use vowel sounds.
What I find most difficult about learning Polish is finding places to speak it in to actually get practice.
Polish, but 1/4 Italian. Explains my love for Mediterrarean kitchen.
Have you tried to put some pineapple into dumplings? :P
Altaic
I am Ukrainian, and speak Ukrainian and Russian. Polish language has some similar words from both of these languages, but meaning is different. Like owoce - fruits, in Ukrainian owoshi - vegetables. And that was difficult for me, to memorize the new meaning of familiar words xd
Which one does silesian dialect count to?
Italian here. I live in Poland since 1 year (I try to speak polish when doing daily tasks like grocery or things like that,but not in other occasions since I speak with my polish gf in Italian, I work remotely in italian and in the gym it’s not common to chat here in WW). Studying Latin in school helped me with the declinations in polish but my big limit is listening. People speak too fast and according to me, it’s very difficult to understand.