A Polish learner at eighteen months can usually name every case, explain the numeral rule and write a correct sentence given a moment to think. In conversation there is no moment. Inside it the noun's gender class, its number, the case demanded by the verb or the preposition, and the agreement of every adjective and numeral around it all have to resolve at once, and the resolving is what takes the time rather than the knowing.
Which means the way through is not more grammar. It is a stock of whole phrases said until the common combinations stop being computed.
The decision, and five words used constantly
- ty and pan or pani. The formal address is not a pronoun but a noun meaning sir or madam, taking a third person verb, so a formal question is literally does the gentleman want.
- Dzień dobry, good day, and it is expected on entering a shop or a lift. Cześć is the informal version and is for people you already address as ty.
- Proszę, covering please, here you are, go ahead, and pardon, decided by situation and tone.
- Dziękuję, thank you, and note that answering it with proszę is the standard reply.
- Przepraszam, sorry and excuse me, opening any approach to a stranger.
- Na razie, see you, the ordinary informal goodbye.
Accurate and slow is a different problem from inaccurate
The distinction matters because the two have opposite fixes. A learner who does not know the endings needs study. A learner who knows them and cannot select one in half a second needs repetition of the selections themselves, which is a different activity and feels like going backwards, because it involves saying things you already know how to say.
The material for it is prepositional phrases, and about a hundred of them cover most of ordinary speech. Each one is a preposition, a case and a noun welded together, said aloud until the case arrives with the phrase rather than being derived from it. That converts the commonest selections from a calculation into a lookup, and it leaves the calculation free for the sentences that genuinely need it.
The other piece is address, and Polish is unusual here. The polite forms are nouns rather than pronouns and they take third person verbs, so speaking politely means talking about the person in front of you rather than to them, grammatically. That is one more agreement to resolve in the same half second, and it is worth automating as fixed phrases too.
Being told you are fluent by people who read your writing
Here is the stall and it is flattering, which is why it persists. Written Polish gives you as long as you like, so a learner's writing is correct and their speech is halting, and the people best placed to judge are frequently reading rather than listening.
Meanwhile the speaking practice that would fix it is uncomfortable in a specific way: to get faster you have to be wrong more often, and a learner who has spent a year being accurate finds that hard to choose. The exit is to set the target explicitly. For a month, aim at speed and accept the errors, using the phrases you have drilled and letting everything else be approximate. It feels like regression, it is not, and it needs somebody who has been told to let you be wrong, which is the arrangement described in finding someone to speak to, and what to do in the hour.
Three kinds of material
What to memorise whole, what to work out, and what to stop avoiding
The columns are not levels. They are three different jobs, and most learners spend all their time in the middle one.
- Memorise whole4
- Prepositional phrases, with the case attached
- Address formulas, with their third person verbs
- The numerals, as constructions rather than words
- Greetings, thanks, and the ordinary exchanges
- Work out in the moment3
- The role of a noun in a clause
- Agreement inside a phrase you have not met
- Which aspect the situation calls for
- Stop avoiding3
- Counting people rather than things
- The past tense with somebody else as subject
- Plurals of groups that include a man
The third column is where the practice has to go and it is the column a learner naturally routes around, because every item in it is a construction that can be replaced with a simpler sentence.
Two things to practise with
A hundred prepositional phrases, drilled aloud, is the object to build. It replaced reviewing case tables, which trains recognition of an ending rather than selection of one, and those are different operations. Free, it takes an evening to write the list and a fortnight to make it automatic, and the phrases should be ones you actually want to say rather than ones from a book.
HelloTalk is the free half of finding somebody, and the rule for using it here is narrow: send voice messages rather than text. It replaced the written exchange, which gives you time to compute and therefore practises the thing that is already working. Free, and it is worth saying in the first message that you want to be corrected on speed rather than on grammar, since most partners will do the reverse by reflex.
The mistake: choosing simpler sentences
Faced with the resolution problem, a learner narrows what they try to say, avoiding numbers, avoiding the plural, avoiding anything that would require an agreement they are not sure of. It works, in the sense that the sentences come out, and it removes exactly the practice that would make the resolutions fast.
The productive version is the reverse: choose the constructions you are slowest at and use them badly on purpose. Counting things, talking about groups of people, and the past tense with a subject who is not you are the three that cost the most, and all three are avoidable in conversation for years. Deliberately not avoiding them for a month does more than any amount of revision, and it is the same argument about seeking the uncomfortable repetition made everywhere in this pillar.
What speaking is resolving
Every selection being made is a case, and which one is demanded by a preposition, a verb or a numeral, in what each ending does, and which preposition demands it. Every past tense verb carries a gender class and an aspect at the same time, in aspect on every verb, and gender reaching into the past tense. The endings being produced differ by one of the three sibilant series, so speaking and hearing them are the same skill twice, in sz, cz, s and c, and the pairs that decide the word. And what comes back at you, at speed, is real speed, and the endings that carry the meaning.