This afternoon I enrolled in Beginning Polish at the university. While not usually the first step to becoming Polish, learning the language is without doubt the longest, hardest, and most important of slogs. Language bears and impresses more culture per unit effort than any other ethnomorphic activity. At the very least, if you can talk the talk, you’ve walked a good deal of the walk.
Taking up a third language—having never really mastered the second, German—sobers me more than a little, especially when the third language is reputed to be considerably more difficult than the second. I studied German for three years in high school, two and a half more in college, and spent a term abroad in Koln, achieving nothing at all resembling competency or comfort. A colleague observes that you begin to understand a language when you dream in it, and that usually happens around third semester. Never happened to me with German, and not only because I don’t dream. I’m overly punctilious about error, thus, a hesitant practitioner. It doesn’t even matter that my auditors might be generous, encouraging, even giddy to help. A high regard for correctness and nuanced usage may serve me badly here, along with another character trait, a tendency to finish what I start. A dangerous combination. We begin in a month.
