Current Events > Pimsleur / Learning a new language

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So my brother is engaged to a Polish girl and the wedding is going to take place in Poland late next year. Apparently only one person in her family speaks any English so I'd like to try and get some kind of grasp on the Polish language between now and then. I've heard good things about Pimsleur previously and the website makes it all sound very impressive but I was wondering if anyone here had any experience with it? Or if there were other methods/programmes people found more effective.

Attending classes is out and while I'd love to get out to Poland beforehand to immerse myself a bit I don't know if that will be viable with work (although it's a possibility). Any advice on the matter is appreciated!
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Polish is really tricky unless you have some Slavic language already. You'll have to put in a lot of work, I'm trying to pick it up now and it's hard. Good luck! I haven't any experience with Pimsleur though.
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Thanks scar! Are you learning by yourself or currently in a course?

I've got no experience with Slavic language at all, unfortunately. I'm not expecting to be fluent this time next year but it'd be nice to have some mutual understanding, else I'll just be stuck with my family and risk looking standoffish, or at the very least have one drawn-out evening.
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Mostly by myself, at quite a low intensity right now. My girlfriend has a Polish background so she can help, but I just do Duolingo, which frankly only gets you so far.

That said, if you put in time you'll learn. But without practice it'll be really difficult to speak and listen.
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To be honest "only so far" might be good enough. How do you find learning with Duolingo? There's a trial lesson on Pimsleur which I'm going to give a go, but it seems that Pimsleur asks for half an hour each day and Duolingo only 5 minutes?
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With Duolingo you can set the length of daily lessons between 5 and 20 minutes. I haven't gotten very far with Polish, but my experience with Portuguese is that it's not bad for getting a basic vocabulary, but it leaves a lot of question marks with regards to grammar. I am lucky enough to be able to speak to PT speakers daily so it's a good compensation.
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You can use Duolingo as much as you want every day. Its completely up to you. And after you complete the tree you can reinforce the stuff youve learned by doing the reverse tree (changing your language settings so you can learn English for Polish speakers). The best things to do while learning a new language are to watch a lot of tv shows/ movies in the language youre learning, listening to music in that language and trying to find someone to practice speaking with. You could practice speaking by talking to employees at polish restaurants or by talking to people on language exchange websites & apps

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That's good advice. There is a Polish girl in my office who I could approach in that regard but I think I'd be more comfortable with that once I had the fundamentals down. Otherwise I'd just feel the pressure of someone measuring my progress which I don't particularly enjoy.

The Pimsleur trial was quite engaging and interesting. I assume the full course is the same, but the first lesson was a short conversation entirely in Polish which it then broke down piece by piece, asking you to repeat back the individual phrases before tying them back together, and then occasionally getting you to recall the earlier phrases as the conversation progressed.

There was a positive and a negative to the purely-audio format: on the positive it felt like a very natural way of learning, rather than rote memorization of nouns and adjectives and rules. The negative is that I could not for the life of me write down anything that I said. I spoke a few of the phrases in to Google Translate and I was just like "....that's what I was saying?!"

I have, at least, learned how to say "I don't understand Polish", so that's something!
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i was in portugal a few months ago & noticed a lot of europeans who didnt speak english or portugese used the google translate app on their phone to communicate with people. seemed a little awkward to talk to someone through a phone loudspeaker but if you have the right personality you can probably pull it off for simple comments, greetings etc

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