I’ve decommissioned the comment option of this blog on the premise that the author ought to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and articulate feature of his own site. And so, I have excommunicated my lovelier commentariat for their lively and insightful violations of this second fundament of writing: narcissism. This stricture has the added value of keeping my attention focused on the evolutions of my own mind under the influence of Polish acculturation. Heaven knows I have had a hard enough time keeping up with the docile creatures that tentatively emerge from the warrens of my intellect and limited imagination (wyobraznia); following the young, nimble half-wild rabbits (kroliky) of suggestion released by others, and those rabbits bred for racing, would simply lead me to exhaustion.
But I will address the most recent comment/suggestion. In response to my penultimate post, in which I observed and lamented the time required for learning a language—learning anything seriously, I dare say—a veteran and accomplished educator, seconded by an uncommonly astute student, suggested that I should see my entire life, every waking hour, as an opportunity to improve my Polish. (Our instructor has additionally suggested we sleep with our books under our pillows.) While it may be the best way of studying a language short of immersing oneself entirely in the culture by moving to Poland, immersing one’s daily life in the words is certainly not an effective way to limit one’s time in acquiring mastery. Quite the opposite. The university recommends that for a 5-credit course like Beginning Polish, a student should expend at least 15 hours per week in study, which I believe I do—in class and in blocs of study throughout the week. Subtracting the 3.5 hours of class time, I should be devoting 11.5 hours of homework per week. Immersing my self in the words would easily absorb the remaining 67 hours of discretionary time: the rest of my life would be homework.
I ventured a little experiment last week after receiving this recommendation and tried, Adamlike in the Polish Garden of Eden, to note and name all of the nouns on my bike ride to work: drzewo (tree), more specifically jesion (ash), klon (maple), brzoza (birch: former cabinet secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski’s name derives from this word), ulica (street), autobus, samochod (car), skrzyzowacasie (crossing), swiatla regulujace ruch uliczny (traffic lights), and, of course, rower (bicycle). It took me awhile to look these up, write them down, and put them to memory. And I still don’t know exactly how to pronounce skrzyzowacasie. Then I thought about all the other nouns I would have to look up on my three-mile ride to work. And not all of them would be in my little $10 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary. Our syllabus recommends Stanislawski’s Wielki Slownik Angielsko-Polski (The Great English-Polish Dictionary), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo (publishing house) Philip Wilson, 1999. There is a 2-volume and a 4-volume edition, @ $180.00—200,000 word and phrase entries. So if, in addition to my normal 15 hours of study a week, I immersed my remaining 67 hours per week in Polish words at the optimistic rate of 25 words/entries per hour, I’d be through Stanislawski in two and a half years. Which returns me to my lament.
