Polish- how would you teach Polish for high school credit?

[TaraP]

My son really wants to learn Polish as his high school foreign language credits. How would you go about doing this? Has anyone successfully used only Duolingo or Rosetta Stone as their program? I know they both have a Polish program. I know a native speaker and might be able to get him together occasionally but not enough for it to be a tutor situation. Any ideas?

[RootAnn]

I'd probably try to find an online class. Barring that, I'd get a book from amazon & supplement with lessons on italki (and have him practice with the native speaker when possible).

[MerryAtHope]

I'm not hugely impressed with Rosetta Stone--it's okay for exposure but I'm not sure how thorough it would be (we used it for Spanish because I was able to get it for free--so the price was right! If I had paid several hundred for it, I wouldn't have been as happy about it.) Maybe try to find a video course or something online if tutoring is out of reach.

[Chanley]

We had the Polish version of Rosetta Stone and I was not impressed with it as an academic course. Does Concordia offer Polish camps? 

[Black-eyed Suzan]

Have you considered using the system explained in Fluent Forever?

 

https://fluent-forever.com

[luuknam]

Note: I don't know any Polish. I clicked on the thread because at some point in the future I'll likely want to put Dutch on my kids' high school transcripts, somehow. 

 

RS Polish, like RS Dutch, has only 3 levels. You could probably turn that into 1, or *maybe* 2 years of high school credit. You'd need to add a grammar book for sure (to be able to follow the grammar RS 'teaches' you), and more reading, writing, and vocab if you're going to call it 2 years (imo). Not that I've taught high school yet, nor have I attended American high school... but quite frankly, in NL when I was a kid they started foreign languages in 7th grade or 8th grade, and by the start of 9th grade we were past RS Level 3. Now, I know that in the US they often don't start foreign languages until 9th grade, but still... it seems pretty clear to me that 3 levels of RS can't possibly be more than 1-2 years worth of high school credit (I've done all 5 levels of RS Spanish, fwiw, so I know what is covered). 

 

Anyway, not sure how helpful that is, but at least it'll give your thread a bump. 

 

ETA: my kids took 1 year to do about 1.5 levels or RS Dutch... but, they started at 5.5 and almost 9yo, not high school age - I'd expect more from a high schooler (I did those 5 levels of RS Spanish in about a year, though I had spent a little bit of time on Spanish before that - in all fairness, I probably should mention I took one year to do 1.5 levels of RS Russian, but I also didn't spend much time on it (too many other things going on), plus it's a harder language).

 

ETA2: I'm not sure what exactly would qualify as a 3rd and 4th year worth of foreign language for high school. 

Edited September 17, 2017 by luuknam

[Nicholas_mom]

ok, we are Ukrainian but my ds wanted to truly learn Ukrainian for High School, grammar and all.  My language skills has dimished over the years and definitely for me grammar has fallen to the wayside.  We checked out Harvard Ukrainian Studies and found an online course for Ukrainian language at a University in Ukraine.  It will be perfect for us.  But I had to really look...went through Canada resources and Harvard because they specifically have Ukrainian Studies to find what I was looking for.

 

Find a University with specific Polish studies and ask them.  Chicago, IL is the second Poland in America so maybe a Univeristy in Chicago might have a Polish Department???

[East Coast Sue]

Some larger cities may have a Saturday school that teaches Polish. Philadelphia is one city that I know has a Polish school. That might not be a complete curriculum but could compliment another one nicely for practical exercises with speaking.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

My son really wants to learn Polish as his high school foreign language credits. How would you go about doing this? Has anyone successfully used only Duolingo or Rosetta Stone as their program? I know they both have a Polish program. I know a native speaker and might be able to get him together occasionally but not enough for it to be a tutor situation. Any ideas?

 

Generally, I'd encourage students to learn languages they are interested in, but Polish is a very difficult language to learn.  I would think it would be next to impossible to learn two good years of high school Polish without ongoing help from a native speaker.

 

If you really wanted to do this, I would seriously look at a summer trip to Poland or some other immersive experience.

 

Another downside of studying less-popular languages is the possibility of not continuing in the language in college.  Even if his Polish is accepted for entrance into college, if he goes to a college that doesn't offer Polish (most of them, I'd guess), he'd need to study another language for graduation requirements, and probably wouldn't be able to test of said requirements.