Pawel
14 Jun 2006 / #1
So you've been told by your girlfriend that you've got one year to learn passable Polish, since that is the amount of time which will elapse until you go on that all-important trip to central Europe and meet her extended family. It will last 4 months, this trip of yours, and you'll be traveling to little godforsaken places where people have never seen a foreigner, much less one who came from across the ocean. What are you going to do? You've got a few options.
You can hire a private teacher at $xx per hour, which teacher will do all her/his best to make you feel like you're learning a lot, but who will, for the sake of extending their gainful employment, try to draw out the teaching process for as long as they can. You will study your three words a day, study your meager pronunciation, learn whatever minuscule grammar the teacher decided to teach you, and feel super happy that you are doing the best you can. When the year is up you will find yourself on Polish soil and attempting to use whatever Polish you've learned, only to find that what your teacher taught you was next to nil, and that you can't really string one coherent sentence together. You will blame it on the Polish language, that it's so "damn near-impossible to learn" and slave through the four months in Poland with the idea that Polish is not your cup of tea, and that you simply can't learn it. This feeling will probably stay with you for the rest of your life, thus shutting Polish and the benefits it can give you forever out of your mind forever.
Another idea you might come up with is to teach yourself Polish from language textbooks and dictionaries. Feeling like you're "the man" you will blow a month's pay on a meter-high stack of textbooks at your local bookstore, and will get to work. Assuming that you will actually stick through pages and pages of explanations of why the word "budynek" changes depending on whether you are inside it, walking beside it, or if there are more than two of them ("why to bloody hell do Nouns change when some action is done to them?"), and you will do the little exercises in the book and read the little excerpts on the margins explaining the significance of this and that, you will end up learning some Polish, and will feel intensely proud of it. In fact, you will take half the books to Poland with you, with the idea that you will go on learning once you're there, that is how well you will be thinking of the textbooks. Once in Poland you will not hesitate to be the the first to strike up a conversation with a random person, only to find out that the person is laughing uncontrollably, and that you really have no idea what he is saying to you. Why? Simple. Nearly all textbooks are garbage, and the Polish they teach is never used/has been used years ago/sounds so strange that people have no idea what you're talking about.
The problem is that textbooks do not teach "natural" language, that is, language that everyday Jan and Piotr use to communicate. Polish is full of slang, local dialects, little additions which are crucial in everyday speech. These things cannot be learned from textbooks, they have to be "felt" by a student of Polish. There is really only one way to learn that, and that is to live in Poland for some time. If that is not an option, then as close a substitute must be found as possible - and there truly is only one: Movies.
Here are the benefits: 1) Movies offer natural language. The sort of conversations you will hear in movies really do happen in real life (more or less). 2) Action which complements natural language. You will find what people say in what sort of situations - what to say to elder people, what to say to young people, etc, all with nice and numerous visual examples. 3) You will learn much about Poland even before coming to it (some of it will be fantasy, of course, so you have to be a selective viewer). Finally, show me any other way you can learn something for two hours and pay as much attention to it at the beginning as at the end.
Movies are unparalleled in learning languages, and Polish is no exception. In one year you could watch over 600 movies, which is over 1200 hours of pure Polish language coming at you. Assuming that you paid your teacher $20 an hour, that would be, well, too much money. And if you tell yourself that you will put in 1200 hours of textbook time, you are lying to yourself. Happy viewing.
Pawel
You can hire a private teacher at $xx per hour, which teacher will do all her/his best to make you feel like you're learning a lot, but who will, for the sake of extending their gainful employment, try to draw out the teaching process for as long as they can. You will study your three words a day, study your meager pronunciation, learn whatever minuscule grammar the teacher decided to teach you, and feel super happy that you are doing the best you can. When the year is up you will find yourself on Polish soil and attempting to use whatever Polish you've learned, only to find that what your teacher taught you was next to nil, and that you can't really string one coherent sentence together. You will blame it on the Polish language, that it's so "damn near-impossible to learn" and slave through the four months in Poland with the idea that Polish is not your cup of tea, and that you simply can't learn it. This feeling will probably stay with you for the rest of your life, thus shutting Polish and the benefits it can give you forever out of your mind forever.
Another idea you might come up with is to teach yourself Polish from language textbooks and dictionaries. Feeling like you're "the man" you will blow a month's pay on a meter-high stack of textbooks at your local bookstore, and will get to work. Assuming that you will actually stick through pages and pages of explanations of why the word "budynek" changes depending on whether you are inside it, walking beside it, or if there are more than two of them ("why to bloody hell do Nouns change when some action is done to them?"), and you will do the little exercises in the book and read the little excerpts on the margins explaining the significance of this and that, you will end up learning some Polish, and will feel intensely proud of it. In fact, you will take half the books to Poland with you, with the idea that you will go on learning once you're there, that is how well you will be thinking of the textbooks. Once in Poland you will not hesitate to be the the first to strike up a conversation with a random person, only to find out that the person is laughing uncontrollably, and that you really have no idea what he is saying to you. Why? Simple. Nearly all textbooks are garbage, and the Polish they teach is never used/has been used years ago/sounds so strange that people have no idea what you're talking about.
The problem is that textbooks do not teach "natural" language, that is, language that everyday Jan and Piotr use to communicate. Polish is full of slang, local dialects, little additions which are crucial in everyday speech. These things cannot be learned from textbooks, they have to be "felt" by a student of Polish. There is really only one way to learn that, and that is to live in Poland for some time. If that is not an option, then as close a substitute must be found as possible - and there truly is only one: Movies.
Here are the benefits: 1) Movies offer natural language. The sort of conversations you will hear in movies really do happen in real life (more or less). 2) Action which complements natural language. You will find what people say in what sort of situations - what to say to elder people, what to say to young people, etc, all with nice and numerous visual examples. 3) You will learn much about Poland even before coming to it (some of it will be fantasy, of course, so you have to be a selective viewer). Finally, show me any other way you can learn something for two hours and pay as much attention to it at the beginning as at the end.
Movies are unparalleled in learning languages, and Polish is no exception. In one year you could watch over 600 movies, which is over 1200 hours of pure Polish language coming at you. Assuming that you paid your teacher $20 an hour, that would be, well, too much money. And if you tell yourself that you will put in 1200 hours of textbook time, you are lying to yourself. Happy viewing.
Pawel
