![]() But, when you want to say that you are travelling by car, the noun must be transformed from samochód to samochodem. In languages with cases, nouns also change forms depending on their relationship to the verb.įor example, the Polish language has an instrumental case which governs how nouns should transform when used as instruments or tools of the verb. Verbs change in form depending on the subject, or who is doing the action. If you’re not familiar with grammatical cases, then you can think of them as being similar to verb conjugations, but for nouns. Not only are the spoken sounds of the Polish language hard to understand, but the language uses a notoriously difficult system of grammatical cases that further complicates things. For a fresh learner whose native language is English or a Romance language, it can take months of listening practice just to parse out the individual words in a sentence of spoken Polish, let alone understand what’s being said.Īn example of Polish cases on a parking sign. In other words, there is a lot of static in spoken Polish, and not a whole lot of signal. Pronounced like p-sh-eh-pra-shah-m, you can see how even basic Polish words tend to be overcrowded with consonants and “sh” sounds. All of the consonants in Polish sort of blend together and the language ends up sounding more like ASMR than something you could actually understand.įor example, take the Polish word for sorry/excuse me, “Przepraszam”. To a beginner, it seems like every other sound in spoken Polish is “sh” or “j”. Polish is full of muffled consonants, too. As a result, it’s very hard to pick individual words out of a spoken sentence in Polish. ![]() In contrast to French or Italian, Polish has lots and lots of consonants with relatively shorter, muted vowels. It’s why babies start by saying “eh-oh” before learning to say hello, or “ah-ee” before saying doggy. Our brains naturally latch on to vowel sounds, and discerning different vowel sounds is a primary way our brains parse the spoken language we hear. In spoken Italian, for example, words like “sono”, “bene”, or “tutto” are easy to pick out of a sentence because of their long, emphasized vowel sounds. Other languages I’ve studied, like Italian and French, are driven by vowel sounds. The first hurdle I faced when I started learning Polish is that it’s incredibly hard to understand spoken Polish. Keep in mind, I’m writing this as a native English speaker, so your experience may differ, especially if you already speak a Slavic language. In this post, I want to dig into the ins and outs of Polish grammar and the other aspects (no pun intended) that make this such a difficult language to learn. I’m writing this from a cafe in Warsaw where I’m entering my 7th week of an intensive Polish language course–and I need to admit, the Polish language is kicking my butt. I’ve studied languages in the past, even “hard” ones like Russian, and figured Polish couldn’t be all that different.įast forward to right now. To be honest, I kind of doubted Polish could possibly be that difficult to learn. When I decided to learn Polish, I came across dozens of articles and forum posts complaining about the difficulty of the Polish language. Grammatical cases with complex declension rules.It’s extremely difficult to understand spoken Polish.Here are the main reasons Polish is so difficult to learn, in order of significance:
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