By Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Fulbright Scholar in Poland
On the third day of Polish class at the University of Wrocław, after our class of seven students from Guadeloupe, Belarus, Germany, Morocco, Japan, and Brazil had finished, I found my head spinning. I was so rusty after not speaking Polish for so many years, and ninety minutes of class only in Polish was a challenge. Some of my fellow students had been living in Poland for years and seemed to be following much more than I could.
Still, I wanted to be the good student.
I approached my teacher after class to ask – how should I prepare for class?
What tips did she had for me? Should I try to use note cards to memorize vocabulary? Should I buy Polish grammar books and review grammatical rules? Should I write down the lyrics to Polish songs and memorize them? I was already meeting with a virtual coach on Verbling weekly; how could my coach best help me prepare for class and learn Polish?
Or, I thought, should I try to follow the example of my quite old-fashioned Russian teacher… I have memories of summer intensive Russian when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley and my teacher with his long grey beard expecting us the stand in front of the class and declaim the memorized Russian-language dialogue that was our homework.
The tricky grammar of Polish, (for foreigners) difficult pronunciation, for example the different forms of “sh” in “szczęśliwy” [lucky], I thought, maybe could best be mastered by trying to swallow whole sentences.
In response to my question, my teacher told me that I should go to museums, concerts, films, and performances, that I should try to immerse myself Polish culture while I am here and listen to the music of the Polish language. She had already handed out “What’s Playing” little booklets. If I really insisted on working through texts, I should try to decipher those texts as these little summaries of events were the ways that people actually spoke, but more importantly, then go to the films and performances.
It was a culture clash.
I had approached the class wanting to learn how I could be as efficient as possible in my four months in Poland. I wanted to learn as much of the language as I could and reach my goals as fast as possible: to be able to communicate in Polish well enough for daily life in Wrocław; and to build a foundation for future study so I may be able to read Polish research on my topic on women in Wrocław/Breslau in the nineteenth century.
Now after three months here, I am still not as far along as I had hoped, but I can see clear progress. I’m following my teacher’s advice by watching Polish films and listening to Polish music, as well as my own tried and true methods of learning language using flashcards and writing and rewriting assignments.
Some of the most helpful suggestions have come from my IU colleague and Professor of Polish Lukasz Sicinski. He encouraged me to focus on vocabulary and start reading secondary sources in Polish in my field of study. He liked my idea of watching Netflix in Polish and listening to Polish music. He also encouraged me to not worry so much about grammar at this point because at my level that would interfere with being able to communicate.
Trying to learn a language in midlife has been a different experience than learning one as a college or graduate student. The new words do not pour into my brain as they had when I was younger. I seem to forget a week later the words that I had only recently memorized. It has been a challenge to feel helpless and unable to communicate. This despite the fact that Polish people in in Wrocław for the most part feel quite positively toward Americans and are usually happy to try to help me.
As I spend these four months in Wrocław and study the Jewish family the Bauers of Breslau and their descendants, I often think about those Jewish immigrants to the United States and other parts of the world in the 1930s where they were like me, trying to learn a new language in midlife – But unlike me they also faced hostility and open antisemitism. I think of my housemates from the Ukraine who are trying to learn Polish as they forge ahead with the continuing war close by.
Learning language has both such broad implications and is so specific and concrete. In this way it is both intensely personal as well as tied up into larger systems of cultures and politics.
And with that thought, I will sign off and head back to my Polish language flashcards, my Polish homework for Wednesday’s class, and a favorite Polish song, Krążę krążę, by Faustyna Maciejczuk.
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