Is it hard to learn Polish if you already know French?
Sunday, May 16th, 2010 at
8:51 pm
I know that knowing one language can make it easier to learn another, such as supposedly it's easier to learn French if you know Spanish, so would my knowledge of French make it easier to learn Polish?
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While I agree to a large extent with Dubdooba, I would add some encouragement. French and Spanish are very similar to each other but at a structural level Polish is as different to English as French is so, if you’ve learned French to a good level, it means you must have the skills.
On the other hand, Polish has much tougher grammar than French for a beginner (but I’d recommend you ignore most of it until you get at least conversational) so it will be a headache.
Richard’s answer was very wrong. Polish has massive influences from German (several thousand shared idioms and most business vocabulary), English (some business vocabulary, computing and slang) and especially Latin, meaning that your French study will at least give you a leg-up in a approaching a text (anything ending in ‘-acja’ would end in ‘-ation’ in French and English, and you’ll recognise it).
I spoke OK French nine years ago when I came to Poland and my Polish is much better than my French now. If you’re not determined to learn it, you won’t succeed with Polish. But if you are determined, you’ll love it.
Not necessarily, because French and Polish aren’t related like French and Spanish are. Having learned a foreign language before makes it easier to learn another in the sense that you might have developed useful language learning techniques and problem solving skills from the other languages you have learned, but simply knowing French won’t make learning Polish easier.
You will not notice any similarities between French and Polish.
French is a romance language, meaning it evolved out of Latin, along with other romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, which why people often say that the similarities between these languages make one of them easier to learn if you know one of the others.
Polish is not a romance language, it is what is known as a Slavic language. The Slavic languages are a language family from Eastern European countries, as well as Polish other ones are Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovakian, Bulgarian. Although these languages have significant similarities to each other, Polish is the most distant language of this family and has probably the fewest similarities with the others.
French and Polish have very little crossover, apart from some instances where they have both recently borrowed the same word from English (or occasionally German). [Not that many though, I know English and French, and I just looked at the first article that came up in Google News Poland http://slask.naszemiasto.pl/artykul/260433,ma-byc-wiecej-pieniedzy-dla-nfz,id,t.html and the only word that I recognise as being similar to anything in Eng or French is the very first one "Minister"!]
Don’t let this put you off though, because language learning is a talent in its own right, so the skills you have developed from learning French to a good level will be very useful in learning Polish.