Language Profile Polish
Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland, with 42.7 million speakers worldwide. Poland is one of the most homogeneous European countries with regard to its mother tongue; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. The Polish language became even more harmonised in the second half of the 20th century, in part due to the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country, during World War II. "Standard" Polish is still spoken somewhat differently in different regions of the country, although the differences between these broad "dialects" are slight. There is never any difficulty in mutual understanding, and non-native speakers are generally unable to distinguish among them easily. The differences are slight compared to different dialects of English, for example.
Learning Polish is easy because:
As in many Slavic languages, including Russian, there are no definite or indefinite articles in Polish, so you can form simple sentences with fewer words. Polish verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. Basic word order in Polish is Subject, Verb, Object, however, as it is a synthetic language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop the subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context. This should make it easier to produce sentences, although sometimes understanding will be impaired.
Learning Polish is challenging because:
Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. There are two number classes, singular and plural, which is common to many European languages and easier to follow than Russian for example. The Polish gender system is complex, due to its combination of three categories: gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personhood (personal versus non-personal) and animacy (animate versus inanimate). The combination in total comprises five gender classes, and these classes can be identified based on declension patterns, adjective-noun agreement, and pronoun-antecedent agreement.
Polish with Cactus:
Cactus provides Polish language training as 1:1 programs, closed groups for in-house company training, full-immersion courses, online courses, self-study, and on public evening courses.