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Colloquial Polish: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series) |  | Author: B. W. Mazur
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $12.00
as of 9/9/2010 15:01 MDT details
You Save: $17.95 (60%)
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 341543
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0415157528
Dewey Decimal Number: 491.8582421
EAN: 9780415157520
Publication Date: October 12, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
This new edition of the best-selling Polish course for beginners has been completely rewritten to make learning the language easier and more enjoyable than before.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Language learning for intelligent people, not for Pavlov's dog August 22, 2010
musikwissenschaft
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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).
 Quite hard. Not really a beginner's book. March 3, 2010
Hello Kitty Ellen (Appleton, WI)
I have taken 3 non-credit Polish language courses and found this book to be quite hard. It starts out teaching a lot of grammar rules, like how to change the endings on verbs, rather than starting with easy words to learn. Each chapter includes a couple short dialogues (only the 1st 8 chapters includes an English translation of them) and then lists some words to learn. Since it is so difficult, and throws you into sentence structure a real Polish person would use, you can pick up a few things but you cannot expect to just read through a chapter and understand everything. I think this book is much too hard for someone who knows no Polish or for someone just traveling to Poland for business/pleasure, even though the book jacket says it was written with these people in mind. It is more of an intermediate college-level course. I do love its word lists in the back, though. It has Polish words with quick English meanings and vice versa. It may be worth the price just for these word lists (I love memorizing new words!).
A Good Choice to ADD to Your Books on Polish March 30, 2008
T. Jackson (Vail, CO & Warsaw Poland)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In short, I have used 3 books in the Routledge series (Polish, Slovak, and Czech) and they are all fairly good - not great. A four star choice for $30.
The Polish book was a very helpful beginning for me with the language. For less time and money than it takes to drive to one college class, you can learn a great deal.
Many people, including me, find that Routledge does not organize these books particularly well. e.g. The index is so-so and does not provide page references - only chapter references; however the chapter numbers are not printed on each page, so it becomes a bit of a treasure hunt each time one wishes to find a topic e.g. superlatives, perfect tense.
totally awesome March 16, 2002
37 out of 39 found this review helpful
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.
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