Struggles with the language

-

One of the things that scared me the most before coming to Poland was, without a doubt, the Polish language -and I bet it’s a shared feeling by most of the volunteers.

It is truth that most of the languages spoken in Europe descend from Indoeuropean, but nowadays they don’t really look alike anymore. Polish, belonging to the Slavic languages family, has very little to do with Spanish (which derives from Latin) or English (German and Latin descent). Also it’s easy to spot some Latin-derived words in Polish, like “biblioteka” or even from French, like “parasol” (meaning umbrella), but these are mainly exceptions and the bulk of vocabulary and grammar forms have nothing to do with anything I am familiar with.

Therefore, I was really worried about how would I communicate with everyone here, especially since Pomiechówek is a small town and I had no high expectations with people speaking English. Fortunately, everyone at the library speaks quite good English –and also Marine, the volunteer from Pompa and Bartek, my mentor- so during most of my day I don’t really need Polish. Withal, in order to be able to communicate at the little shops, cafes or to ask for signs… well, everyone surely needs some basic knowledge in Polish.

That’s why the program European Voluntary Service includes a  30-hour course of the language of the country you find yourself at. The previous volunteers in Pomiechówek had these lessons through and online program, apparently not very useful. However, Marine and I were lucky enough to have private lessons with an amazing teacher, who is actually specialized in teaching foreigners.

I still remember the first day of our course,  a dark evening in November. The teacher, Pani Kasia, spoke in Polish from the start, and though then she later translated everything English, it was really overwhelming and I was sure that I would never be able to understand a word in this language, left alone speak it myself. Still, as weeks passed, Marine and I could totally feel the progress, especially when we catched some words in the middle of conversations of our coworkers or started to understand what the billboards on our way home tried to sell.   

I have to admit that I still don’t understand everything, and also that there are plenty of sounds my Spanish ear doesn’t recognize hence I can’t  pronounce -words containing dzi,ż,si, ci, ,ć, ś, sz still make me feel nervous when I should say them😓.  Despite this, I am very happy with our evolution and very proud every time I manage to communicate in Polish what I need with non-English speakers.

Apart from the good luck of having found a real instructor instead of the online way, we were very lucky to have fund Kasia, for not only she  is a wonderful teacher but also person. She mixed greatly grammar with vocabulary, and games with cultural information. She even invited us to her school to do presentations about our countries to the children!

Finally, we completed our course with Kasia the 7th of May and she kindly brought us chocolate and a dyplom! It was a really sweet reword but we are surely going to miss her and her lessons!!
Here is a picture of the happy moment, so guys, it's possible to get along well with the Polish language! 😊



Popular posts from this blog

Could the English language actually be French?

-
Image
  If some of you are familiar with the English and French language, you might have discovered some ressemblance between the two, most likely in our vocabulary. You might have guessed that this is not a coincidence and you would be right: the ressemblances between those two languages did not happen by accident but are the results of their common history and the meeting of different tribes and people.  Just as every language, the English language has been shaped by the combination of different dialects throughout History, the main ones being Latin and Germanic languages, spoken in the British isles after German tribes decided to settle there. The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes invaded Britain in the 5th century [1]. The Angles gave their name to England (in French  Angleterre - literally land of the Angle) and together with the Saxons, gave a name to the "anglo-saxon" people. With the Jutes, they participated in shaping what is now called Old English. However, in 1066, En...
Read more

New volunteer in Pomiechówek!

-
Image
Hi, it's Sara! ¡Hola! I'm Sara, the Spanish volunteer working in Pomiechówek's library this year. I come from a little city in the south of Spain called Badajoz. My town is on the border with Portugal so it is common to see Portuguese people in my city. Actually, you can cross the border walking haha. However, for the last five years, I moved to another town in the North, called Salamanca, where I studied English literature and linguistics and recently finished my master's in English culture and literature. Since I was little I've always had a passion for good stories. I especially enjoyed reading about myths and legends from different cultures. One of my favourite books as a child was a collection of volumes about Greek mythology. I think that was the beginning of all.  I like to think that my passion for folklore comes from the fact that I was born on the 31st of October, the night of Halloween. That is why I usually refer to myself as a Scorpio by soul because I...
Read more

Polish and the Origin of European Languages

-
Image
     Polish and the Origin of European Languages Have you ever wondered where does your language come from? Why do we speak so many different languages in Europe? Why are European languages so similar to one another, but at the same time W hy are others too different from the rest? And most importantly, who were the first ones to start speaking? Well, the answers to these questions were already solved in the eighteenth century by the British linguist and researcher William Jones, who during a visit to India noticed similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and other European languages such as the Celtic varieties spoken in Great Britain and Ireland. He collected his research in the edited volume The Sanskrit Language , in which he developed a comparative analysis that led him to find a common root in almost all European languages. This is how the term Indo-European was born, which designates a primitive language that was the origin of modern languages that goes from ...
Read more