 Polish made easier, 2008-07-29
A good CD to get you started. I really liked it. Staying in Zacopane with an English/Polish family they said my accent was good. On visiting another Polish friend she was supprised i had manged to pick up so much in a short time. Not the 1 day but several weeks of car driving to and from work, and whenever on my ipod shuffle. I went on to buy a teach your self Polish and hopefully some classes before my next visit to Poland.
 Will teach you to count etcetera , 2008-11-03
This is a very basic Polish course, just what I expected but to much wasted time on trivial attempts at humour.
Polish people would laugh hysterically at the English persons pronunciations of the Polish words, basic counting and directions, it's a starting point in the language, it sort of drums it home how difficult Polish is for the English, at least it will teach one to count to ten and know right from left.
Jury's still out (5 stars provisional), 2008-06-22
I think this could be good, but I won't know until I've gone to Poland later in the year to find out if what I've learned is genuinely useful.
The style is quirky - Andy's a Home Counties hombre with a penchant for Ferraris, while Magda's a right bossy broad who speaks with a real posh English accent. She's cut-glass, while Andy sounds more like broken-glass...
The two meet on a plane to Poland and amiable Andy agrees to let mistress-like Magda teach him some Polish. She's a bit posh and condescending, while Andy tries hard to play up his "I'm just one-of-the-lads" credentials.
The funny thing is that it might just work. Polish as a language is absolutely brutal and there's really no time to get into the grammar. Making yourself understood and understanding what people say to you at the most basic level is probably all you can hope for.
I speak as someone with a languages background. I understand case, gender, verbal aspect and all of that stuff, but Polish is - as I said - brutal. Heck, I don't understand how a modern language can actually be more complicated than Latin, but Polish is.
Now, I've put One-day Polish on my mp3 player and, after a few days, I think I've grasped the basics of "I want...", "Where is...", "I'm (called)..." and so on. Sure, there's plenty of gaps, but these can be easily filled in with a little Googling.
As a linguist, I know the sort of things that will be necessary in a functional, if simple, conversation of necessity. One-day Polish should give you just - barely - enough to scrape through.
Andy's a real Essex boy and Magda sounds like she just walked off the stage from a Royal Shakespeare production, but there's a lot of basic and useful Polish here.
Sometimes, I'd like to open the cabin door and have them both sucked out into the upper ionosphere (or whatever -sphere relates to a plane at cruising altitude) on account of their annoying-ness but, deep-down, I rather like the characters.
Ignoring Andy's hapless attempts at humour and Magda's RADA accent, I think there's enough here to make this worthwhile.
I've given it five stars, but I'll review that after I've been to Poland.
As they say in all the best movies, "It's crazy, but it might just work."
I reckon that One-day Polish will work.
A Very Good Buy - but not one-day!, 2008-01-11
I must admit I rather pooh-poohed this item when I went into the bookshop to buy a Polish CD course, and I opted for the full 'Teach Yourself Polish', which I then found much too difficult, too fast (check out the reviews for this course). So I went back to the bookshop and bought 'One-Day Polish'.
And I am so glad I did!
Ignore the 'one-day' bit, of course, but within a week together with my iPod, I was most satisfyingly grounded in 'meeting and greeting', 'finding my way around', 'buying things' and 'going to a restaurant' - I had learnt 50+ words and a number of sentences - 'Swietnie!' - 'Brilliant!'; maybe not completely grammatical - as 'Magda' on the disk says - "The grammar's not completely right but you're communicating!" At least I felt I was progressing.
I think that this was an excellent, fun little course to get me started. It would be nice, however, if more use could have been made of CD technology, by allowing the listener to 'go back' to certain points straightaway without 're-winding' which is never accurate, thus avoiding all the English bits, which, after you've heard them several times, you don't really need again.
But overall I am very happy with my purchase (I can't say the same about 'Teach Yourself Polish' which I have now gone back to!) - it would be fantastic if Elisabeth Smith could produce similar courses, each one level slightly higher. That would be great. 'Swietnie!'
('Swietnie!' needs an acute accent on the 'S' but this Web Site doesn't allow for such luxuries!)
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