Beginner's Polish (Beginner's Guide)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Ewa Wanasz-Bialasiewicz Our price £4.82 New from £1.97 Used from £2.36 Pages: 200 (Paperback) ISBN: 0781802997 Pub: Hippocrene Books Inc.,U.S. Pub date: 1995-04-10 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 488764

Reader Reviews:

terrible! (0/0 people found this helpful)

I am an ESL teacher, but have been asked to teach Polish to a friend. Unfortunately I bought this book without having properly looked at it. Apart from the objections of the reader above me, with which I totally agree, I must add that this book contains obvious language, grammar and vocabulary mistakes. I have only been through chapters one and two and filled a whole page of my A4 sized notebook with mistakes and things that would not normally be said in an everyday situation. The dialogues seem to be directly translated from Enlish into Polish and then back to English. I believe no one bothered to check what was really written there.

Not necessarily for beginners. (4/4 people found this helpful)

The first part of the book did offer valuable information for someone planning on traveling to Poland, however the instructional section of the book was, in my opinion, limited for use by the beginner. I have not had the opportunity to view any other Polish instructional texts, but based upon my experience with French and German in school and Greek on my own, I believe that anyone who picks up this book will be somewhat disappointed. The basic pronounciations for the Polish alphabet and letter combinations were given but phonetic spellings for vocabulary words would have been a major benefit. I think it would also have been beneficial if cognates had been used as much as possible. Much of the grammatical explainations that were given were of a more technical nature and probably more likely to be of value to a language major than to the average person. Many of the translations that are presented are inconsistent with each other. An example would be the word "tak" which is translated as meaning "yes" in one sentence and "yes we do" in another. A verbatim translation would seem more useful in teaching a foreign language than multiple translations out of context. The phrases "John is my name" and "My name is John" convey the same meaning but it only serves to confuse the student to translate one way as being the other. In summary, I believe that this text would be better titled "Beginner's Intermediate Polish" because a firm knowledge of Polish pronounciations and at least some Polish vocabulary would almost be a prerequisite for this particular book.

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