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From now on, Ukrainians in Poland, as well as schoolchildren and students of Ukrainian educational institutions, will be able to learn Polish for free or improve their knowledge online thanks to the innovative Lingva Polska system. The programme has received the appropriate official approval from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, which allows the system to be used in the educational process.
According to a sociological survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, only 22% of Ukrainians with refugee status in Poland have learned Polish, and most of them have a superficial knowledge of the language. Only 10% of Ukrainians can speak Polish fluently. At the same time, Ukrainians identified the following as the main barriers to mastering a foreign language: lack of time (38%) and lack of finances (33%).
In Ukraine, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, almost 90,000 students study Polish. This is the 4th most popular foreign language in schools
With a mission to help Ukrainians who want to learn Polish, the Association of Innovative and Digital Education has developed the Lingva Polska Polish language learning system. The learning programme consists of 30 modules of 5 lessons each and contains 10,000+ exercises at each level (A1 and A2). Each lesson has its own thematic dialogue and 50-70 tasks to master the material. Learning is based on realistic dialogues (cases) voiced by native speakers. In addition, the process incorporates the principle of gamification, which allows the learner to compete with themselves in terms of speed and correctness of the exercises. The programme as a whole is aimed at developing linguistic intuition, which allows to build sentences the way native speakers do. Additionally, the system interface includes a special virtual keyboard with letters of the Polish alphabet that are not found on conventional computer keyboards
In the first week alone, more than 10,000 users have already registered on the project portal. Anyone can register by following the link https://lingvapl.org/register
For convenience, the project team has created a short training video to help you get started quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahWBJIqtNk
"The Lingva Polska programme incorporates all of our positive long-term experience in teaching foreign languages to Ukrainians. Users go through a large number of different exercises and learn more than 10,000 phrases that they can use freely in their communication. We took a very careful approach to the creation of this product, so every element of the system was worked out: these include author’s visualizations for the learning content, dialogues voiced by native speakers, etc. The most popular levels A1 and A2 are already available,”- says Maria Boguslav, Executive Director of the Association of Innovative and Digital Education, Coordinator of the Network of Ukrainian Education Hubs.
"Given that Poland is a strategic partner of Ukraine, and many Ukrainians now need to communicate fluently in Polish, the Ministry of Education and Science welcomes the creation of the Lingua Polska programme. We are pleased that Ukrainians have free opportunities to learn foreign languages, as this contributes to personal development and opens up many new opportunities. So now all Ukrainians abroad and in Ukraine can learn Polish for free, and teachers can use this programme in schools to make learning more interesting and useful,”- says Andriy Stashkiv, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine.
Vitalii Zubkov, a well-known psycholinguist and polyglot who has helped thousands of people learn 5 foreign languages over 20 years and is the author of the Lingva Polska methodology, explained
"There is a misconception that to be fluent in a foreign language, you need to know a lot of words and use them according to the rules. But no native speaker of any language in the world does that. Thanks to our programme, the user learns Polish as if it were their native language and gains confidence that they can understand and speak Polish. The programme falls in love with the user’s ability to communicate in Polish from the very first lessons, when learning becomes not a difficult routine but an interesting adventure.”
The project attracted the attention of the Deloitte Poland Foundation, which became its partner and offered its financial support.
"We are very pleased to have contributed to the creation of such an innovative and useful tool. We hope that Lingva Polska will help many Ukrainians overcome the language barrier. Learning Polish is one of the ways to help Ukrainians adapt to their new country and to help the younger generation of Ukrainians and Poles understand each other better,”- says Adam Maryuk, President of the Board of “Deloitte Foundation Poland”.
Earlier, the Association of Innovative and Digital Education, together with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine and the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, launched Ecosystems for learning and testing the level of proficiency in Ukrainian and English. The Association is also the author of the Lingva.Skills English and German language learning system, which last year was included in the National Register of Records as the largest online educational project in Ukraine, and in 2019 was included by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in the TOP 10 social startups in Eastern Europe. So far, users have completed more than 200 million exercises in this project
Illustrations to the material: https://fex.net/s/rkabvvt