Naivety. I’m not sure it can be helped when one travels
abroad, especially on the first international trip.
Upon learning that I would be going to Poland, I did what I
am sure many people do. I researched the food, photos of the cities I’d be
visiting, and the language.
“I’ve got plenty of time,” I thought. “I can learn some of
the language. Yeah, if I really work at, I can be at least fairly functional by
the time I go.” Oh you stupid, stupid boy.
Yes, like many a noble yet unlearned ideas I’ve had, I
really didn’t have any intentions of giving this my full effort. It wasn’t even
going to be a good college try. Half-baked is probably too good a term for my
effort. But in my defense, I did look it up on the internet. Isn’t that close
enough?
Plus, Polish is one of the most difficult languages in
existence. It usually ends up in the top ten of difficult languages to learn on
many experts’ lists. The main hope for English speaking people is that most of
the letters in the Polish alphabet are the same as ours. It isn’t a completely
foreign looking language like Arabic or something Asian.
There are more than 26 letters in their arsenal, however.
The extra letters are diacritics. These are existing letters with marks above,
below, or through them. One example is the Polish letter Ą. Now you may think
that is a variant, or at worse a deviant A. Nope. It is a completely different
letter. They have an A already.
This is distinctly a Ą. Why? I don’t know! They also have letters in their
alphabet that are not used in native Polish words. They are only in their
alphabet for the sake of words that are imported/adapted from other languages
and only make appearances when those foreign words become a part of the Polish
language.
Polish is also one of those Slavic languages where you’ll
find a string of consonants without vowels to break them up. So if you think
you are going to pronounce things phonetically, you’ve got another thing
coming. To an English speaking person, that many consonants without a vowel
break is a code that that can’t be cracked. It’s like driving a car that can go
300 miles on a tank of gas, and the gap between gas stations is 400 miles. The
tongue just needs the vowel break. I think the most consonants I saw in a row
was four. Wow.
There are also multiple genders in the Polish language. In
many languages, every noun and/or pronoun is assigned a gender such as male or
female. To me it seems arbitrary, but it does affect how you refer to the noun
and/or pronoun with other words. That is why in French you have la and le in
front of nouns, for example. Polish has three genders (or more, depending on
who you ask).
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it: A distinction is also made between animate
and inanimate masculine nouns in the singular, and between masculine personal
and non-personal nouns in the plural. There are seven cases: nominative,
genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. Yeah, I
don’t even want to think about it anymore.
Then there are rules that aren’t really rules yet they are
rules. They aren’t just suggestions but they bend and flex in so many different
directions based on the situation. Situational grammar. How fluid. Even Przemek
had a book that he had to refer to from time to time to make sure he was
getting his own language right. And he wasn’t writing a thesis!
So I didn’t learn much of the language before I went. I did
try, however, to learn some while I was there. I managed to master a couple of words, but that’s about it.
I was often met with the same reaction when I asked a Polish person to teach me
to say a word or phrase. It was a shaking of the head, a sympathetic
expression, and a hand on the shoulder. They all came together to say “Don’t
even try, you stupid American boy.”
It all ended in disaster. They will often give you a word to
repeat, and I would repeat it just the way I thought it was said. They would
say no then repeat it again. All I could think was, “Wasn’t that what I just
said? It sounded the same to me!” Yet they heard a big enough difference to say
that I didn’t even get close. What a lingual loser.
Przemek’s wife Gosia did try to teach me some words. One
came across to me to sound like MEOWCHOW. I repeated it a few times, and Gosia
just stared at me. She then said, “You speak better cat than Polish!”
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