Jon Holato

What a shocker this must be to some of my human-interest loving readers, but yes, I am still in pursuit of learning Polish. I have not been doing my Rosetta Stone as I should be, but if you recall the last time I posted about learning Polish I had purchased a Polish phrasebook with two-way dictionary from Borders. This book continues to be great but today I added another tool to the mix.

This morning I purchased a beginning Polish audiobook from iTunes. I have had my eye on it for a few weeks now, and last night I finally decided to pull the trigger and make the purchase. It’s one of those typical Polish-English deals where there is a native Polish speaker who says a word and then an English speaker gives the meaning.

Although I have only been using it for about 40 minutes now, I am already finding this very useful. Not necessarily for injecting a fresh whirl of Polish vocabulary into my brain, but rather, this is showing me how much the other tools have taught me. Whenever she says something that was covered in one of my Rosetta Stone lessons I can immediately recall it without waiting for the English translation. However, for things learned from the Polish phrasebook I have trouble distinguishing them right away, and am only able to recall after the English version is presented to me.

This is a clear testament to the effectiveness of the Rosetta Stone software package, and a real kick in the butt to start using it every night again. Babcia is coming in 2 months so it’s time to put together an intensive immersion game plan and get going full force with this!