The early quiz and homework returns indicate that I haven’t lost my knack for getting good grades. But after thirty years at university, I know the difference between getting good grades and actually learning the material. Not that I am not learning Polish. One cannot encounter so fresh and osmotic a subject and not absorb significant amounts at the outset, only that I’m all too aware of what I don’t know and should know after five weeks—and could know if I worked harder: hard and soft consonants, what exactly voicing and devoicing is, and the rules for devoicing. Our instructor provides explanations in a linguistic jargon not less difficult than Polish itself. These “rules” do not help me express. They seem descriptive, analytic, not the kind of formulae by which one naturally generates discourse. In first language acquisition, we more or less learn these rules practically by ear and use, then take grammar exams on them in eighth grade, exams which have little impact on the average person’s competency, thankfully. In second language learning, at least in the academy, such linguistic scaffolding remains primary to pedagogy. And so, one can earn As without necessarily feeling any intimations of fluency. In time, our instructor assures us, in time.
And it is time, time on task, drill time, practice time, listening time—time that accounts for whatever progress I have made so far and exhibited in quiz and homework. I have no gift, no genius for foreign languages; I grind. When I am called upon to recite in class, perhaps half of those times I have drawn, immediately, a complete blank, and made that embarrassing excursus to dithering lexical incompetence—the kind that characterized George W. Bush at a press conference. This brain infarct, initially cognitive, is not becoming; it engenders embarrassment, which further compounds the hesitation. Affect affects effect. Sometimes I emerge from that foggy thicket, the path spontaneously and inexplicably opened in my mind ex nihilo, like the universe; sometimes I simply guess and grope to success; sometimes the instructor graciously moves on to another student, who provides an answer I knew but simply could not produce. Professor Polakiewicz has wisely not attempted to coax right answers out of me. When I’m wrong, I seem to benefit somewhat from stewing in error, tamten not tento—which is not even a word, only a misguided construction. If there were time, I could learn Polish best by making every possible language mistake in the book, but I suspect that the possible mistakes are infinite and time, not.
