English translation

Hi, my name is Radek, and welcome to the next episode on the „Polish with Radek” channel, a channel addressed to those who learn Polish through watching authentic content, such as this one. If you don’t speak Polish fluently yet, please make sure to turn on the subtitles, so to understand to a greater degree what I am talking about.

In today’s episode I will tell you how to understand spoken Polish, how to increase your understanding of the Polish language in three steps.

Many people learn Polish, but they are still unable to understand this language. In such cases materials, such as my channel, come in handy. but they should be used properly. How to do it? First of all, one should listen. Listening is a very important skill. When it comes to understanding Polish, spoken Polish, it is precisely this spoken language that we should listen to. Not the language we read, not what we say, just listening. By mastering this skill, we will feel more confident as we understand most of the messages which are addressed to us, whether on the street, or in the workplace, or at any other place, where we have contact with Polish.

Just look at how children learn… In the first years they speak very little, at first, they listen, they are exposed to the language, and they tend to answer with one, two words, (with time, with a few more words). Similarly with written text: of course, writing, grammar tasks, reading books in a foreign language – these are all skills, which develop us a lot, but compared to the spoken word, the written word is a relatively new ability which the human species has mastered just a few thousand years ago, compared to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, during which we talked to each other as people. And when it comes to grammar, it’s an even newer invention, probably associated only with the Greek and Roman civilizations, when people began to study the grammar of these two ancient, classic languages. So the first step is to listen.

And at that point some of you may ask: „Okay, but how do I listen, when Poles speak very quickly, and I don’t understand what I listen to?” That’s true. To make listening useful, to make listening really helpful, we must understand what is being said to us. There is a saying [which says] that „a drowning man will not learn to swim”. If we have contact with a language that we don’t understand, we [simply] won’t learn it. Just like we won’t learn any Japanese from Japanese anime cartoons.

So the second, very important element is translating. Translating helps us to increase the percentage of what we understand. That is, when at first, we only understand 20-30% of the text, then, thanks to translating it at our own pace, using the transcript, we can increase our comprehension to 60-70-80%. And then we shall understand the main message. We shall understand the main point of what a given person wants to tell us, and we shall figure out the other elements from the context, we will acquire them naturally. Perfection doesn’t matter here, we don’t need to understand 100%, we don’t have to understand every, even the tiniest, element.

But here comes another challenge, that is, translation takes time. Translating a 10-to-20-minute video may require even a few hours. To change these proportions of the input, that is, the time we spend to understand a given text, and outputs, that is, how many (authentic and natural) texts in Polish we understand, we should listen to these texts several times. If we have already translated something, we should listen to it as much as possible. With every repetition we learn the words that are covered in that recording, we hear them in their natural context, pronounced naturally, not in isolation, as a single word, but within whole sentences, or even within entire discourses, entire arguments. And there’s no much more philosophy to it…

To sum up, if we want to understand spoken Polish, we must practice precisely this skill, nothing else but the ability to listen. Not the speaking skill, not [the skill of] solving grammar exercises, not [the skill of] writing letters, but [the skill of] listening.

Secondly, we should help ourselves by translating what we don’t understand, by translating whole videos, whole audio recordings into our first language. For many people that would English, which is why my videos are by default translated into English, and the transcripts that I share on my website have a Polish transcription next to the English translation, so that you can compare these two language versions.

And finally, when you’ve already made the effort to better understand a given text, you’ve translated incomprehensible words, you’ve reflected over the constructions used, over the verb conjugations, or over the noun declensions, then leverage it as much as possible, and listen to such video many times: 10, 20, 30 times.

There is no upper limit, of course, it all depends on you: the point is that you shouldn’t get bored or discouraged. If you’ve got bored with a movie, a video, or an audio recording, get to the next one. And the do the same thing, that is, first listen to it with subtitles, recognize whether the topic interests you at all, whether the speaker speaks interestingly, speaks comprehensibly.

If so, go ahead and translate it, and then listen to that video, to that recording multiple times, of course, doing also other things, which don’t require your constant attention, such as: cleaning, waiting in a queue, ironing, preparing meals, cooking, going to work, shopping, taking the dog for a walk. These moments, which are sometimes called 'temps morts’ in French, and its Polish equivalent would probably be 'the meantime’, that is, the time between doing something and something else, they are the perfect time to learn foreign languages, by listening multiple times to interesting, authentic materials which we understand, which we’ve already translated, and which are of interest to us.

I personally learn foreign languages this way, so I hope that this video has been helpful to you. If so, please leave a like, and subscribe to the channel for more similar content. And please share your thoughts in the comments: do you study this way, or maybe you use some other methods, approaches, observations. I would like to know your opinion, your views. Thanks, and see in the next video! Bye!