I’ve come to Polish late in life. Having a degree in English (inc linguistics) from 40 years ago, and having “done” German, Latin, French and Welsh, I appreciate that teaching yourself Polish is *virtually* impossible. I do it out of interest & enjoyment. It keeps the brain active even if lacking a practical application.

Without YouTube, to hear how it’s spoken, it would be a non-starter. Lonely Planet beats other phrasebooks as a first taste. A Berlitz słownik, stuff from University of Pittsburg (haven’t looked it much so far), Wiktionary, Wikipedia. And, just arrived in the post, Oscar Swan’s “Polish Verbs & Essential of Grammar”, 2008 edition – I’ve only read the first 2 pages but it seems a gold mine & cleared up several things already. Google Translate is often awful but can be a useful starting point. IVONA for computer generated text-to-speech, Forvo for real people pronouncing individual words. And taking every chance to speak, though they are few, and to listen all the time. Someone passing on the street talking into a phone and saying “Nie widziałem cię..” Listening in the pub for the occasional word you know and hearing how it’s said in everyday speech – it all helps. I’m registered at Polish Forums & will take a deep breath & dive in soon.

Pozdrawiam! Dziękuję bardzo.

While I am reading or studying I usually always have these web pages opened:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t#pl|en
http://www2.ling.pl/
http://www.wiktionary.org/

Google Translate and Wiktionary have been pretty good at helping me figure out the meaning of words either when conjugated or declined.

Ling.pl is pretty good, but I also use the onet.pl słowniki if ling is being stupid.

I also found http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/ early on after combing through Google search results. The Swan PDF files are quite handy for going into the gory details

Do you know a poet called Paulo Leminski?

He wrote:

Love

Love is a link between blue and yellow