That's Easy for You to Say....

As I wrote a while back, I started self-studying the Polish language a few months after I arrived. I did okay for a while, but if there is something I have learned about myself it is that I do better with language when I have someone to ask questions of as I go along. As a result, I took the plunge to start formal language classes. After four weeks, I can say….holy crap, this language is not easy.

The place I signed up for teaches entirely in Polish from day 1. The self-study I had done was a life-saver at that point as I otherwise might have gotten completely frustrated and given up. Instead, the format, while slow going, is forcing me to pay more attention and practice more than I otherwise would have.

The class has been invaluable in another way – making me face that I had been completely botching a lot of things for the previous few months and pointing out to me how forgiving Polish people can be when you mangle their language. Compared to Armenia, where people seemed not to understand a lot of my early attempts, people here seem to be able to piece together the scraps I toss out and realize what I am trying to say. Still, I am looking forward to going back to the local pharmacy and see if the pharmacist reacts differently when I finally ask for a refill of something in the proper way.

One of my co-workers told me that Polish people tend to be naturally downbeat (for example, when asked “how are you?” they tend not to answer “I am well”, but instead to voice a complaint of some sort). Still, when he tried to tell me that Polish is complicated, with a lot of exceptions and exceptions to exceptions, I figured he was exaggerating a bit and asked myself “how hard can it be?”

The answer is, pretty hard. As a friend of mine once said to me about a rather demanding person we both know: “Miss [name redacted] has a lot of rules…”

One of the first things to really throw me in class was learning that many nouns have multiple plural forms, depending on how many of something you are talking about. One form applies to 2-4 of them, another for 5-21, the first again for 22-24, etc. Oh, and it’s not as simple as that – one of those forms is in the nominative case and the other in the genitive (luckily I learned about cases when I learned Armenian or my head might have exploded). Even the words “one” and “two” have different forms depending on the gender of the noun you are referring to (masculine, feminine or neuter) and whether that noun refers to a person or not.

The numbers themselves are tricky and quite a few are overly long. The word for “ninety” has sixteen letters (dziewięćdziesiąt) [pronounced like jevienchjishant] but “one hundred” is nice and easy (sto).

This week, we learned the vocabulary for referring to family members. A surprise in there was that I can’t simply say that I have four nieces: I use one word to refer to my brother’s daughter (bratanica) and another to refer to my sisters’ daughters (siostrzenica) and the words change slightly if I want to refer to my niece instead of a niece.

The good thing is that, even at this early stage of the classes, some things are making more sense to me. Some of the rules (and some of the exceptions) have a sort of logic that I can follow and some of the longer words are easier once you understand the pieces that are combined to make them up.

We haven’t gotten too much into grammar yet, and have really only started on verbs in singular forms (I already know that is a huge undertaking without even touching upon the plural forms).Still, I can now introduce myself and explain my basic background with what I am told is pretty good pronunciation. More often I can distinguish individual words and a few phrases when I hear people having a conversation and I can skim headlines in the newspaper and get the gist of some of them. Pretty good progress for four weeks, I dare say.

One thing that made me feel a bit better is that several people have told me that many Poles don't speak the language well, so nobody will expect perfection from me. I heard recently that when Lech Walęsa was president, not only did he not speak English, but he traveled with an interpreter to translate his Polish....to Polish, so that his audience could understand him. 

So maybe I can stop being so self-conscious....