I only made real progress once I decided to stop pairing them up and concentrated more on how to make imperfective verbs perfective and vice versa (and decoding new verbs according to those principles). But it needs to be two way, the traditional way of always using the imperfective as a base is just too complicated and too easily leads to students who don’t realize that przepraszam uses the same root as proszę.

After a long while it became easier for to pair them up if I wanted, but that’s a skill that’s easier if you don’t try to do it directly. And my system seems more complex on the surface but when explained face to face with examples more than one person has told me it’s more understandable and helps them deal with verb forms more than the traditional approaches.

(And I left out a small class of always imperfective roots that remain imperfective even if you add a coverb prefix, like chodzić and kładać) not to mention that when you add an imperfective process to a root that’s already imperfective you get a habitual (miewać, bywać)

the following is abbreviated (and contrary to the way most Polish textbooks for foreigners explain things).

1. learn roots by which aspect class they belong too, that is what aspect is the most basic form of the verb? Most of the time this is imperfective (czytać, sprzątać, myśleć) but there are also basic perfective roots (kupić, dać, otwórzyć) and some where neither seems basic (zamykać and zamknąć both have explicit aspect markers)

2. learn the processes that make verbs perfective or imperfective, anytime you add a coverb prefix, the result is perfective
internal vowel changes (mostly to -a-) and consonant changes (mostly from ‘softer’ to ‘harder’ consonants) always make verbs imperfective.
Adding a suffix with a -w- in it always makes it imperfective.

3. Then anytime you see a verb you can reconstruct the morphological processes and realize what aspect it is:
porozmawiać comes from the basic root mówic – imperfective, and has three processes added, the coverb prefix roz- makes it perfective and then internal soundchanges (-ó-i-) to (-a-ia-) make it imperfective rozmawiać and then the second coverb prefix makes it perfective again.

4. Finally, think of imperfective and perfective verbs as independent verbs and pair them up into ‘aspect pairs’ as little as possible.

My lips and mouth don’t always go the right way and it
would really help to hear the words.

Thanks