Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, two weeks in to my 90-Day Challenge challenging the language of Polish. I’ve been working heavily with the material from Piotr from Real Polish, which I mentioned last time, both his 100 stories, which are great, and his podcasts. I’ve been downloading content from Radio Polski. The audio doesn’t necessarily match the text, but I’m reading the text. My vocabulary — I’ve added 5,000 words to my known words in Polish and I have saved another 4,000 words and phrases.

So those are words I’m studying. I might know half of them, I’m sure up to about 8,000 words or so in two weeks, but that’s based on knowing some Ukrainian, Czech and Russian. I don’t think I could do that in Turkish. Next year I’m going to go after a language that’s unrelated to anything I’ve ever studied. It might be Turkish. It might be Arabic. I don’t know yet. It might Greek or something.

Anyway, I’m enjoying Piotr’s material. I’m listening a lot and I’m going to start answering. His material, the 100 stories which I think are brilliant, he says don’t study grammar, just do the stories. You listen to the story, you listen to a different point of view and then you have these questions which I have not, up until now, been answering out loud. He suggests we answer out loud, but we don’t have to if we don’t want to. So, initially, I haven’t been and I think I’m going to start doing that.

I want to get myself out of my comfort zone in terms of vocabulary by reading things. I’ve already read a book on Polish history, I’ve gone to the Wikipedia page of Polish history and I’ve imported all of that into LingQ. I’m going through, because I’m interested in history, gaining words and phrases from the radio site, from the history sites and so forth and at the same time I’m doing the easier material that Piotr has in his 100 stories. So I’m on sort of a two track here.

Since I’m not quite familiar with all the vocabulary in Piotr’s stories, having imported them all into LingQ and created links and stuff, now I’m going to start actually answering out loud. I might do it just listening or I might do it while I’m reviewing in sentence view on the iPad so I can actually read the individual question or I can say the answer, go to the next sentence, see the answer and say it again.

All of these things I’m going to be doing (A) to increase my vocabulary, but also to prepare myself for speaking because come the beginning of October or soon into October, I want to have a conversation with Piotr.

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Questions — send me your questions. When I say send them, just put your questions here at YouTube, we’ll gather them up and once a week I try to answer them.

Thank you and I hope you’re all working hard on your 90-Day Challenge. Thanks for listening, bye for now.

 

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