Polish Resources

[Eheu]

I've recently taken up trying to learn some Polish, but I've encountered a problem; what I have to learn from goes from a borrowed copy of Rosetta Stone straight to the various grammars I can find in my university's library, with no real middle ground. I've looked about the library for some introductory material, but not been particularly successful.

Both have their merits and downsides; Rosetta Stone is good for getting a grip on pronunciation (much as I'm doubtful it'll be of great use when I move onto more complex aspects), I've found, since it's hard to get an idea for how the words are actually pronounced from phrases like "c is similar to 'ts' in "cats" in books, but is somewhat less formal than I'd like. I've a background in English, Spanish and Latin, so while some oddities of Polish such as the greater distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs are unfamiliar, ideas of conjugation and declension in a general sense are old fare -- I'd rather have a fairly formal treatment of those, if possible.

That's why I looked for the grammars, but the problem there is that they're too formal; I can see them being of tremendous use when I'm more familiar with the language, but when I'm so new they're not particularly user-friendly. Is anybody aware of something to guide me through Polish conjugation, declension, and so on in a relatively rigourous way? Expanding my vocabulary would also be welcome, but the main concern at the moment is that my knowledge of inflection in the language is so slight.

[@maniexx]

You are really brave to even think of learning polish. It's goddamn hard.

Here's what I found : http://www.skwierzyna.net/polishgrammar.pdf
Also if you want to ask a native speaker about anything just PM me.

[Cathode Ray Sunshine]

http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Polish%20FAST
http://sites.google.com/site/soyouwanttolearnalanguage/languagee-books4

The other languages at the FSI site have at least recorded parts for the accompanying text, but it doesn't seem to be the case for Polish, unfortunately.

[Eheu]

Ack! After getting hammered by work and then falling pretty seriously ill, I forgot all about this thread; sorry!

The main challenge I'm finding is declension and making adjectives agree correctly. The idea of agreement with gender and number is familiar to me from Spanish, and agreeing with case isn't anything new either thanks to Latin -- the problem is that, where Latin was fairly regular (with a few oddities) in declension, Polish seems a lot more awkward. Latin was a matter of learning how each of the five declensions were formed in the singular and plural, and mostly being okay from there; Polish has certain cases if it's masculine animate, others if it's inanimate, and then feminine and neuter, to say nothing of how the stem of the word influences the ending by sound.

It's interesting, but incredibly confusing: is anybody aware of any sources for practicing this?

[math1985]

I think this course is quite good:
http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/