# Introductory Paragraph Correction



## Sternie

Hello. From reading the guidelines, I understand this forum seems to be desgined to deal with specific questions. If you know somewhere more appropriate for this, please redirect me to it.
Below, I have posted a brief paragraph, and am interested in having any grammatical errors in it flagged up so I can guage my progress. I am learning the language because I want to visit my friends abroad, but the only Polish person I'm able see regularly in England isn't a great teacher and is too busy trying to have a good time to spend a great deal of time actually correcting my efforts (which is fair enough). I stay in touch with my friends in Poland, but we're all busy and seldom have chance to write long letters, let alone teach each other our languages. Thus I'm often alone when it comes to learning Polish, so I have to search for ways to keep practicing it. Thank you for any help you might offer.

Dzień dobry! Nazywam się Sam. Jestem z Anglia, i mam dwadzieścia lat. Jestem uczy polskiego bo mam koleżanki z Polsce. Piszemy po polsku, ale dwa razy w miesiąc, i mój polski jest niedobry. Mam jedna polski kolega w Anglia i mówimy po polsku, ale on jest niedobry nauczycielka (on ma nazywa Tomek - przepraszam, Tom!). Chcę piszę na to forum, bo chcę piszę, czytam i mówię dobrze.


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## Sawa99

Hi!
It sounds not bad, only a little correction:

Dzień dobry! Nazywam się Sam. Jestem z Angli*i *i mam dwadzieścia lat. Uczę się polskiego*,* bo mam koleżanki z Pols*ki. *Piszemy po polsku ale *tylko *dwa razy w miesiąc*u *i mój polski nie* jest najlepszy. *Mam jednego koleg*ę Polaka* i *rozmawiamy *po polsku ale on *nie jest dobrym nauczycielem* (nazywa się Tomek - przepraszam Tom!).
Piszę na *tym *forum, bo chcę pis*ać*, czyt*ać* i mówi*ć* *poprawnie.
*
I hope it will help you.Good luck


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## jasio

Sawa99 said:


> Dzień dobry! Nazywam się Sam. Jestem z Angli*i *i mam dwadzieścia lat. Uczę się polskiego*,* bo mam koleżanki z Pols*ki. *Piszemy po polsku ale *tylko *dwa razy w miesiąc*u *i mój polski nie* jest najlepszy. *Mam jednego koleg*ę Polaka* i *rozmawiamy *po polsku ale on *nie jest dobrym nauczycielem* (nazywa się Tomek - przepraszam Tom!). Piszę na *tym *forum, bo chcę pis*ać*, czyt*ać* i mówi*ć* *poprawnie.*



Considering Sam's issues with grammatical cases, it would be good to know if he has one female friend from Poland ('koleżankę'), more female friends ('koleżanki') or friends of both sexes ('kolegów' or 'kolegów i koleżanki' if you want to stress that they are of both sexes).


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## Sternie

Thanks for the responses! Sawa99 - exactly what I was lookng for. Jasio - I have three female friends, although there's one in particular I'd be most likely to visit (two of them are in the south and the other is up in Gdańsk), so it might have been more appropriate in my text to write about one.

Grammar I find hard especially, because I haven't found proper tuition in my area as of yet, and about the only practice I get speaking other than when I meet with Tomek is when I go to the Polish shop (and of course, my friends sometimes work in Oxford, so I get to talk to them when those times come around). Other than that, my resources for practice are books and Rosetta Stone, and whilst they're quite useful, because they aren't people, they leave me having to decide whether I'm right or wrong (technically, Rosetta Stone corrects me, but leaves me deciding whether or not I've actually learnt what I was supposed to). Unfortunately, I'm not equipped to decide that without feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about, So thanks again.


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## jasio

Sternie said:


> Thanks for the responses! Sawa99 - exactly what I was lookng for. Jasio - I have three female friends, although there's one in particular I'd be most likely to visit (two of them are in the south and the other is up in Gdańsk), so it might have been more appropriate in my text to write about one.



Well... I can't advise you on whom you're going to refer to.  Just wanted you to be aware that it influences the suffix. 



Sternie said:


> Grammar I find hard


It's because Polish grammar _*is*_ really hard. Especially for an English speaker, because many concepts behind the Polish structures (such as grammatical cases, genders, aspects, complex matching of forms of parts of speech, etc.) simply do not exist in English. There are also concepts in English which do not exist in Polish (such as articles, continuous tenses, perfect tenses), but overall English is far simpler, especially on a beginner level.

Actually, sometimes I think that if I were to learn Polish as a second language, I would never succeed, so I admire your determination.  On the other hand, I've met some foreigners (French, Italian, American, German), who learned Polish as a foreign language and were quite successful.


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## Sternie

It's obviously a hard language, and it is a struggle, but I think like anything else, if I dedicate enough time to it, I should at least be able to gain enough fluency to get by (doesn't help that it's the first time I've tried to learn a new language, so I'm also learning what the best methods are as well as the content). Thanks for the advice!


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## wolfbm1

I've heard an Englishman say that Polish is very hard at the beginning, but after a while it becomes easier. On the other hand, English seems to be easy at the beginning, but later on it gets very complicated.


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## Sternie

What I immediately found easy about it was spelling - even if I've never heard a word, I feel like I can make a good guess as to how it's spelt, as it seems a lot more phonetic than English. And after realising why (or at least some reasons why-as you can see, I have a lot to learn), how frequently, and what part of words change due to context and stuff, the whole task feels at least a little bit less daunting and is becoming increasingly good fun.


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## zapedowski

Except for the spelling (I believe that the word spell is not needed in Polish since an 8 years old Polish child can spell even words which he never heard before) English followed by German is by far the easiest language of my acquaintance. 
Polish, which is my native tongue is the most difficult language of my acquaintance.  In Polish we conjugate our verbs for all three genders in three persons in all three tenses. For a native English speaker this alone is excruciatingly difficult. We have seven declensions of nouns and our nouns have three genders. Our adjectives must conform to the genders of our nouns. 
When we compare this grammar to the English grammar we find one conjugation of verbs in the third person exclusively and without regard to gender. The nouns do not decline and they do not have a gender. Since the nouns do not have a gender, the adjectives do not have genders as well. This being said, English spelling is not phonetic and you can write a word and pronounce it quite differently or vice versa pronounce several words identically but write them differently.


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