Christmas at the Historical House

First, here is a much better post on the subject of Christmas in an old house. It is by Hilaire Belloc.

I know it is much better than my post before my post comes into being because I am terribly, terribly tired. I am often tired by sunset Christmas Eve and again by Christmas Night, but this was the first Christmas Eve I was tired when I woke up. And I was tired this morning until I went out and walked two miles.

This was not the first Christmas I had hysterics because of a kitchen failure; that has happened at least twice before, years ago. However, it was the first Christmas I had hysterics on Christmas Eve. It was the trifle what done it: the custard I had made from scratch didn't set. I fled from the kitchen and wailed--deep, loud sobs--in the bedroom until I remembered the box of shop custard left over from my most recent attempt to fatten up B.A. I then got up and found my mother cheerfully preparing the custard, having already cut up the cake in 1 inch pieces.

I went to bed soon after. It was fortunate we had planned to go to the Third Mass of Christmas, at noon, not the First, at midnight.

My mother made the Sacred Christmas Bun. She woke up at 6:30 AM to bake it, which was very nice for me, as it meant I didn't have to do it.

Christmas Dinner was splendid: Autumn Vegetable soup with thyme from the planters outside the house; honey-glazed curried carrots; green beans with red pepper and almonds; roast goose stuffed with lemons, potatoes, rosemary and thyme;  cranberry relish; the trifle; mince tarts; mixed nuts; white white, red wine, ice wine. There were five of us to consume it--three had flown from Canada to do so.

After a rest, I left the family in front of "Scrooged" and washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. I was very pleased and proud about my clean kitchen afterwards. Despite the odd attack of hysterics this year and that, I really do enjoy baking Christmas treats and making Christmas dinner. However, I have discovered this year that I was too tired from working 8 hour days, 5 days a week to really enjoy the kitchen marathon. I do not know how other women who work full-time manage it all.

This morning I put away the dishes and then went for a walk by the Firth of Forth, and I felt very glad of the fresh air and exercise. Writing news full-time is a very indoor pursuit. Eventually I found a cafe that was actually open, and a woman in it made me a cappuccino, and I was very glad of that too. Then I walked home and suggested to my mother, brother, and husband that we walk by way of the cycle paths to central Edinburgh, leaving early enough so as to get there before dark (i.e. 4 PM). They agreed, so we all had a splendid walk through the remnants of countryside between the Historical House and the city.

But I won't do the dishes tonight. I am done with washing/cooking/cleaning for the next 24 hours. And, on a week's furlough from the Culture Wars, I will spend as much time outside as possible for the next six days.

Secrets of Learning Languages Part Two B

I may be awfully stupid, but it took me years to drop the idea that one can learn languages simply by
attending courses. It never occurred to me that successful language learning takes an enormous amount of private work, parcelled into a long series of manageable tasks. Today I suspect I could learn even mathematics, so long as the plan of work was divided into sufficiently small parts.

That's why I am hesitant in recommending language classes. However, it cannot be denied that formal classes are a good resource, if only because you have at least one fluent person in front of you serving as a model.

University Classes (Day)

At nineteen, I believed firmly that you found languages came easily or you were dumb at them. Thus, I wasted a lot of time shedding tears over my Greek textbook, feeling stupid and hating myself. I did much better at Latin, which which I was already somewhat familiar. I flunked Irish outright, in part because I hated the sound of myself struggling with the words and so ceased trying. Lord, it was awful to be nineteen.

Were I to wake up and discover myself nineteen again, only--please God--without the fear and the crippling self-hated, I would sign up for Russian and Business and work towards becoming a multi-millionaire. I would locate and befriend my best friend Trish on the proper day, but otherwise I would keep my head down, make a workable plan and memorise, memorise, memorise, speak, speak, speak.

Undergrad university programs are valuable for their resources. Both my universities (Toronto and Boston College) had excellent language labs, but unfortunately I never used the Toronto one. I often used the BC one a for French and German, which seemed to make the Language Lab Librarian happy. They also have exchange programs with other universities, and this is important because apparently immersion really does the fluency trick. Finally, they have professors who are so potty about their languages they did PhDs in them and now need to justify their courses' existence with the numbers of students who take them. Thus if you show yourself keen, they will love you and help you with all their power.

University Classes (Night)

I am a morning person, and I am afraid to be out after dark on my own. Nevertheless, I went to night classes at Edinburgh University for five years to learn Polish and brush up my Italian. The principal Polish instructor is a very dedicated and very clever teacher. If she could make her students fluent in Polish sheerly though teaching, she would.

However, the two big problems with night school classes are that (A) you are surrounded by people who also don't speak your target language fluently and, more seriously, (B) there are no tests.

No tests, no grades. I suspect the "Languages for All" program is shrewdly thinking that adult learners hated tests and grades when they are students, and now just want the fun parts of learning. I sympathise. But testing is HOW we memorise and grading is HOW we can judge our progress. We cannot learn to speak languages very well without testing our recollection. Every foreign language conversation is a kind of test.

In despair I asked my night class teacher if any of her night school students had become fluent in Polish, and after thinking about it awhile, she said yes--one. I think he was Dutch.

But despite that depressing statistic, under her watch Polish night school courses are flourishing. There is a sort of Dumbledorska's Army at Edinburgh Uni marching onward and onward towards fluency, never quitting, no matter how many years they have signed up with Languages for All.

If I were starting Polish 1.2 all over again,  I would make all the vocabulary in Dumbledorska's excellent class materials into flashcards, memorise them, and then read her meticulously written dialogues aloud to captive Polish friends, or cajole them into reading them with me.

Another advantage of night classes is that if you take them long enough, you find yourself with a small band of people just as obsessed as yourself and who (unlike other family and friends) admire you for your stubbornness. And if your mutual obsession is Polish--Hej, chłopcy, bagnet na broń just about sums it up because you are actually becoming Polish by osmosis.

Private Tutors

I have had six private Polish tutors, and one Italian one, and only three of them have been paid. In general I have operated on an Language Exchange basis: I proofread your university papers, you listen to me read Polish.

Paid-in-cash tutors are the best tutors, in my experience, for a few reasons. First, tutors who are friends are too kind and gentle and, unwilling to see me suffer, let me give up too soon.

(That said, one of my friends has been an enormous help by writing me long letters in Polish in difficult handwriting. Although the handwriting has occasionally reduced me to tears, it turns out that the longer it takes to read a word, the better you recall it. Thus there is a virtue in chicken-scratch handwriting hitherto unappreciated.)

Second, paid-in-cash tutors have skin in the game, as the kids say. Mine seem very conscientious, too.

The advantages of paid tutelage over night school classes are very important to me:

1. you, and you alone, are in the linguistic spotlight for the lesson and you have no place to hide;
2. you can meet your tutor at the time of day you are most brainy and/or comfortable;
3. you can reschedule meetings, so you never lose your money's worth; and
4. at the advanced level, you can just have conversations for most of the lesson, which is the best way to reach your linguistic goal, if that is to have conversations with native speakers. *

The disadvantage is that going to a tutor costs more than going to class, if you are the sort of person who never misses a class.

I'm very grateful for my five years of Dumbledorska's night school classes, and I do plan to return from furlough when it's feasible, but I have to say that my ability to converse in Polish has really come along only since I began:

1. lessons with my current tutor,
2. to read a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magicians' Nephew a week with
3. strict attention to the meanings of ALL the words and
4. memorising 5-10 of the new ones every day with
5. meticulous record keeping.

*You don't need a tutor for Latin. Work though Wheelock, then purchase an advanced grammar and a good dictionary, and get to work translating Caesar, Horace and Cicero.

Secrets of Learning Languages Part Two A

Unsuitable for adult learners  

Ponder the six-year-old Polish child. Since before she was born, the Polish child has been, unconsciously or consciously, listening to the Polish language. Her early attempts to speak were met with universal admiration. Her mispronunciations were corrected gently, or not at all. She has been carted around her neighbourhood by Polish-speakers, and almost everyone she has met has smiled at her and asked her simple Polish questions, initially without expecting any reply. If she has difficulties with Polish pronunciation, which is common among Polish children, she will be sent to a kindly speech therapist. Only now is she being taught rudimentary reading and writing.

I have before me the elementary reading textbook for two generations of Poles, Elementarz (1974), and it is hard to read. Here is a random example:

Kto to? To Ala i Ola.

Ala stoi i Ola stoi.

A to lalki Ali i Oli.

Lola stoi i Tola stoi.

A oto As Ali i osa.

As stoi. A osa lata.

Taka to ta osa.

Good luck finding clues to all that in a Polish for Foreigners elementary textbook. It was years before I discovered you can sometimes replace the verb "to be" with "to" and that it makes life simpler. 

Thankfully, just like a six-year-old Polish child, I am now capable of figuring out Elementarz. Unlike a six-year-old Polish child, however, I have been horribly neglected these past six years. Polish ladies don't all smile at me just for living. I don't get daily universal admiration for my Polish skills. My family doesn't slowly and distinctly repeat what I say in Polish. There are no Polish cartoons on television, and I had to find songs for Polish children on my own. 

On the plus side, I am big enough to wrestle my massive dictionary down from the shelf, I am allowed to go the library on my own, and I have enough money for Polish classes. When comparing children's ability to learn languages and adults' ability to learn languages, adults and children have different advantages. But the top lesson from Elementarz is that you should not be depressed if you can't read children's books after studying a language for three years. A three year old native speaker can't read them either. 

But books meant for native children's literacy development are not interchangeable with books meant for foreign adults' linguistic development, so Elementarz should be put aside for a long time, reserved for such advanced japes as reciting its poems at parties. The Adult Way of Doing Language is served by three principal methods: Self-Study Series, Classes and Private Tutors. However, I recommend reading books about learning languages first.  To learn more effectively, it's a good idea to learn HOW to learn.

How to Learn Languages Books and Blogs

When it came to learning Polish, I should have read "How to Learn" books first, but better late than never. I have profited very much in the past two years from reading books about language-learning and about memory-training.  Here are my favourites:

How to Speak Any Language Fluently by Alex Rawlings 

Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown

Success with Languages by Stella Hurd

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner 

Mezzofanti's Gift by Michael Erard.

Mezzofanti's Gift introduced me to the seductive world of hyper-polyglots and their blogs. My go-to online resource for language advice is Alexander Arguelles' Foreign Language Expertise. 

I am a lot more comfortable writing than I am socialising with complete strangers, so the Benny Lewis Fluent in Three Months advice to go to a bar and start repeating your three weeks worth of gibberish to native speakers and bask in their admiration leaves me cold. And skeptical. 

Self-Study Series

Pimsleur--Ideal for Pronunciation.

Because I was easily embarrassed six years ago, my first attempts to learn Polish involved Pimsleur. I took out the first Pimsleur Polish lessons from the library, and eventually my generous father bought me the whole Pimsleur Polish program as a gift. I will never forget shutting myself in the Georgian linen closet/library/laundry room in our flat with Pimsleur Polish 1 Lesson 1 and my acute embarrassment at repeating "Przepraszam" after the CD. To put this in perspective, I was alone in a huge house with thick walls in a spacious park with no neighbours, and yet I felt mortified. 

Pimsleur programs are both incredibly brilliant and incredibly limited, and I recommend them as starting points because they are all about pronunciation and drilling the basics into your resistant brain and clumsy tongue. There are no reading materials. You will learn very few words, but if you obey the program you will learn how to say them perfectly. 

Colloquial... (Routledge)--Good start to Grammar.

Our church organist very kindly gave me his Colloquial Polish (by Bolesław W. Mazur) set,  and I never gave it back. I never finished it either, which is a pity, and I should take another look. I was working my way through when I began Polish classes a year later.  Like Pimsleur, the "Colloquial" books have crucial listening materials, but they also teach reading and grammar. 

Specialized Stuff--Keeps you going. 

If you are learning one of the Big Languages--French, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic--you will have no trouble finding self-study courses. Less popular languages for study, like Polish and Urdu, aren't covered by all the big publishing houses. But that's okay because there are smaller publishers who do cater to learners of one particular language. 

The elementary Polish for Foreigners series in Poland (and at the University of Toronto) is Krok po Kroku, but a Polish friend gave me the text for Polish in 4 Weeks, and I read it from cover to cover. I did most of the exercises, and I was sad that the CD was missing.  

After visiting it at the store a few times, I bought Part 2 of Polish in 4 Weeks. I listened religiously to the CD although I see I gave up on the exercises. This is probably because I felt class homework was enough. 

(Suddenly I realise why Benedict Ambrose worried that I did nothing all day for years but study Polish. We interrupt this program so I can go tell him.) 

Although I really loved Polish in 4 Weeks, and it certainly improved my grasp of grammar and listening comprehensions, it didn't adequately pour Polish into my stubborn brain. I now realise--thanks to Fluent Forever--that this was because I never studied the material.  

Eventually I began to memorise the Polish in 4 Weeks dialogues, but I did this by writing out them out over and over again. In real life, you don't write out dialogues over and over again. You speak them. And yes, you do repeat the same things: who you are, where you are from, why you speak X, what you think of X-land, how your husband is doing today, and what you think of the appalling social changes sweeping your own miserable country. 

Preprinted Flashcards

I do have a set of Polish flashcards, which I basically had to go to Poland to get. Although I think flashcards are crucial to learning a language, I think they are more effective when you make them yourself and when you use words taken from an ongoing lesson, book or film.  Flashcards isolated from context aren't great. And, besides, when it comes to words crucial to Polish social life like "oczepiny" (a series of traditional Polish wedding rituals), good luck finding them in a box of preprinted flashcards. 

No matter what self-study series you use, you absolutely will not advance quickly if you do not do the hard work of memorisation and recall, preferably aloud.

Next up: university classes, day and night

Secrets of Learning Languages Part One

They look a lot more worn now.

I can no longer resist the lure of my blog, so here I am with some Secrets of Learning Languages (Part One).

1. You don't need talent.

There is probably such a thing as talent, a mysterious gift that separates the Very Good from the Outstanding. However, you didn't need talent to learn your native language, and you don't need it to learn other people's languages either. One of the most damaging things a child can believe is that she can't do something because she's simply not talented. Her logical assumption will be not "Try, try again" but "Why should I bother?"

A grown-up told me when I was 19 or so that I wasn't "good at" languages. I had been taught French for twelve years, Italian for three and Latin for one and received A or B grades in them all.  But I believed the grown-up and went on to do abysmally in university Latin, Greek and Irish before switching my major to English Literature because I knew the A's would come easily (talent!), and they did.

I am now reasonably fluent (see #7) in Italian and Polish, and use both languages for work, but this is not through talent.

2. Interest + Application + Time = Language

So you don't need "talent" for learning languages. You need to work. Unfortunately, "how to work" is not often taught in school, and if you sailed through elementary school, you might not have learned it on your own before you hit the wall in high school. Also unfortunately, a capacity to work (in my culture anyway) is treated like a virtue, not a skill, and even then it is second banana to "talent."  So here are the main components of language work:

Language work involves interest, application and time.

Interest: When learning languages it is best to pick a language you have good reasons to learn. However, these have to be compelling and personal reasons, not merely practical. The most practical (and one of the hardest for anglophones) language you can learn right now is probably Mandarin. But unless you have deep personal reasons for learning Mandarin, like an all-absorbing love of China, Chinese cuisine, your Chinese boyfriend, Kung Fu or eavesdropping on Mandarin-speakers on the bus, you are probably not going to power through the pain involved in learning Mandarin.

I picked Italian in high school to avoid Art class, but also because it was the most widely-spoken European language in my city at that time. Learning to speak it was also a sort of revenge on the Italian-Canadians who bullied me in elementary school. Years later it became the Language of Vacations Abroad.

I started Polish to help sell the Polish translation of my first book and didn't quit because a kind friend told me not to bother even trying because I would never, ever learn Polish.

And now that I can read it, I'm too scared. 

Application: I have been studying Polish for about six years, two months, and I have used many different materials: textbooks, class handouts, films, songs, dictionaries, grammars, novels, talking books, prayer books, poetry books, tourist brochures, and food labels. I would have become fluent years ago had I studied a little EVERY DAY. My current level of fluency has come about because I  have studied for at least an hour EVERY DAY without a break since October 8.  But more importantly, I never quit (for longer than one angry night). Never quitting is the secret to language-learning because of the magic of time.

Time: Given what I now know about how I learn languages, I predict that I will be able to function in Polish society without linguistic problems in three years. If I begin Urdu this January and study every day, I will be able to converse biographically in Urdu in three years.

If only I would give Italian half an hour of my daily attention outside of work ....

Well, I don't do that badly chatting to my Italian tutor and translating what Marco Tosatti thinks because I started learning Italian 31 years ago. Every time I have learned, recalled or relearned and (especially) heard or spoken an Italian word since September 1986, my Italian skills have been strengthened.

I have often praised my high school Italian teacher for her excellent teaching, but I was a dud when she enrolled me in an Italian language contest c.1989. (More on the inadequacy of classroom learning later.) To my horror, after three years I couldn't actually speak Italian. (I assumed I lacked talent.)

Flash forward to 1997. At the end of 1997, I decided to relearn French, Italian, Latin and Greek. French and Greek eventually fell by the wayside, but I worked my way through my high school Italian textbook and Wheelock's Latin Grammar. I also borrowed a Passport Books "Teach Yourself Italian" set from the Library. In 1998 I went to Italy for the first time, and I could speak Italian. Not comprehensively, but well enough for touristic purposes. Well enough for my workplace, too.

The fact that I can chat away with my Italian tutor twenty years later probably has as much to do with that intense relearning in 1997-8 as it does with the initial learning in 1986-9. But there is another very important factor:

3. Getting so used to feeling stupid you no longer fear it. 

By embarking on language learning, you are risking feeling stupid at regular intervals for years. That which you have been able to do well in your own language since you were six (or sixteen or twenty for reading and writing) you will no longer do well.  You will stammer, blush, feel stupid and hate yourself. You will think "Language Fail" again and again, especially when the object of your Target Language communication answers you back in English.

But I have many thoughts on this subject, too:

a) even native speakers don't speak their native language perfectly (or intelligibly)* all the time, so even if you achieve "native-like" fluency, you will still make mistakes;

b) governments across the world pour money into teaching children English, and that's why all those young people in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland and even Russia speak at least tourist-level English;

c) humility improves your character;

d) it's scientifically proven that the trauma of embarrassment over mistakes helps you memorise the corrections;

e) the better you get, the more impressed other people are that you speak the Target Language at all;

f) realising that the process of learning a language is psychological, not moral, helps kill shame;

g) the shame wears off the more often and the longer you speak to native speakers.

4.  The highs make up for the lows.

Speaking in Polish is much more difficult than speaking in Italian, but when I use either successfully,  my brain seems to flood with dopamine. I leave Italian class feeling high: happy and hilarious. I'm not quite there with Polish classes although I do enjoy reading Polish very much.

When I finish a week's work on a chapter of the Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew, I feel very satisfied. And naturally I am pleased when I recall enough words to ask a Polish interview subject some questions. However, there is still a lot of fear/shame mixed up in my Polish communications, and it will probably linger for at least another year or so.

Fear/shame is obviously one of the lows. Other enemies to your language-learning happiness are skeptical friends, alarmed members of your family, and unsympathetic or merely clueless native speakers of your target language.  However, you can turn these negatives into plusses.

First, you can use the friends' skepticism as a goad, as I did. "I'll show them" may sound like an odd inspiration, but as I mentioned above, it has worked for me twice.

Second, your family members' alarm will wear off as they get used to your new hobby. Eventually they may start to brag about it. After complaining for six years about how impractical learning Polish is, Benedict Ambrose volunteered me as his hospital ward's Polish translator.

Third, if you can't take the heat of a nation's character, get out of their language kitchen. In general, the French hate French spoken badly. In general, the Poles are blunt. In general, non-anglophones do not understand just how insulting rude English words sound to anglophones, so if Francophones or Allophones tell you in English how you sound in their language, it may hurt more than they mean it to.

The way to deal is to find unusually kindly people who are native speakers of your Target Language and practise on them. These include teachers, but remember that not all teachers are kindly or able.

śłedź! śłedź! yummy śłedź!

5. Yes, you have to memorise. 

The good news is that language classes aren't useless (more on this later). The bad news is that you will have to supplement classes with memorisation.

For about forty years I laboured under the delusion that to learn something all you have to do is go to class, do the homework and cram for the exam. If despite doing all these things, you don't get an A, you don't "have talent", so give up.

What the last six years, two months have taught me is that the only way to stuff hundreds of words and dozens of grammatical points into an adult human head (or my adult human head) is through constant memorisation through testing.

It makes me a little sad, now, thinking about the five years of Polish night school classes I took without spending every other night memorising the new words presented in the lessons. I did the homework, and I participated in the classes, and I never fell asleep once, despite being a morning person. However, there were never any tests, and so I never actually studied, and so my spoken and written Polish progressed but slowly.

I read, yes, and I looked up words in the dictionary. (Working with a Polish dictionary is a skill in itself, let me tell you.) Reading is the easiest part of language-learning for adults. I also wrote letters, and occasionally got a Polish friend to correct them. But I couldn't speak Polish very well, and I had a very hard time concentrating hard enough to comprehend spoken Polish. Eventually I found this so frustrating, I finally began reading books about fluency. And they all said the same thing: you have to memorise.

6. There's a problem with Anki.

The fluency books recommend memorisation though flashcards in  Spaced Repetition Systems like Anki or, for the less electronically inclined, Leitner boxes.

Gabriel Weiner of Fluent Forever believes that using English on flashcards impedes memory so, not being electronically inclined, I made hundreds of flashcards with pictures on one side and Polish words on the other. Drawing passable pictures took SO LONG I gave up and turned to Anki.

However Anki has a big bug. If you miss a single day of review, Anki will present you with more cards than you can cope with. Miss a week and Anki will hit you with a blizzard of pictures. You will go out of your mind with impatience waiting to come to the end of your afternoon-long Anki exam.  The more new words you put into Anki, the worse the problem becomes.

Another problem is that you might not remember what concept you were trying to indicate with your pictures. This is a particular problem for any word not a noun.

Besides, it turns out that Weiner is not quite right. Although young people may learn faster with images, older learners may learn faster with words. This is, in fact, true for me.  I am much more likely to recall text than a picture. I have noticed this while speaking, When I need a Polish word I can't quite remember, it comes floating up before my mind's eye in my own handwriting.

I now have a new Spaced Repetition System to cope with the overload and work with my script-loving brain. After reading a new chapter of The Magician's Nephew, I write down all the words I don't instantly recognize. That came to 144 this week. I divide the list by 6. From Monday to Saturday, I look up the dictionary definitions for a sixth of the words, e.g. 24.

Then every day I look at the list and choose the five to ten most useful-looking words.  I make English-Polish flashcards for them. They go into the "Test tomorrow" part of my Letter box. The next day, after I learn them again, they go into the "Test Sunday" section. After Sunday's test (and relearning), they go in the "Test a Month from Now" slot.

On December 26, I will test myself on the "Sunday cards" from November 26, and then they will go in the "Test in Two Months" box.  This is not at all scientific, but I suppose in February I'll put them in a "Text in Six Months" box. Or maybe I will throw them on a bonfire. It is impossible to count how many words a language has, but my Oxford-PWN Polish-English Dictionary contains "200,000 words and phrases".

That's a lot of cards.

7. Fluency is a continuum.

My Polish tutor is guilt-striken because she doesn't think she is earning her fee. Mostly she sits in a hipster cafe listening to me chatting away about my week. She attempts to teach me grammar, but either I know something very well or not at all. And every week I turn up knowing 30 more words she didn't teach me. What's a Polish tutor to do?

"The problem is that you are fluent," she said.

"No, I'm not," I replied, astounded. I was astounded because, for one thing, I understand only half of whatever she ever says, and for another, the only way I can really get going in a Polish conversation is to travel down the well-worn track of "When I was ..."

It may be truthful to say that I am fluent compared to all my tutor's OTHER clients, or that I am fluent next to the vast majority of non-Poles, or that I can rattle off ungrammatical Polish for five minutes at a stretch. At any rate, it is probably a good idea not to get too hung up on the word "fluent" although for six years, two months I have longed to become fluent and waited in vain for the magical switch I've heard about to flip so I can understand all Polish.

Suddenly I remember the exchange between my night school teacher and me when I was feeling particularly disgruntled with my lack of progress. "I have been studying for X years, and I still can't have a conversation," I said, or words to that effect, in Polish.

"But we're having a conversation right now!" protested my night school teacher.

First year of learning Polish: no grey hair. 

*I have met many English-speaking Continentals who have a hard time understanding Scottish accents for the first few years of their residence in Scotland. Some Scottish accents still give me trouble, and I've been here for almost nine years.


To be continued...

Chariot or Flying Carpet or Well-Trained Dragon or ...

Every morning I silence the alarm on my iPhone and fall out of bed. After making coffee and doing a quick scan of the latest emails, I shut the computer and begin the day's dictionary searches.

This is because, as mentioned at work, I am reading a Polish translation of The Magician's Nephew. On Sundays I turn to a new chapter, read the whole thing, and write down the words I don't understand. Then I divide the list into six mini-lists. Every subsequent day I tackle a mini-list and choose 5-10 words to memorise.

I am now on Chapter 6, "Uncle Andrew Begins to Have Troubles," which is my English translation of Mr. Polkowski's Polish translation of "The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles."

To repeat what I said at work, it is very interesting to read a childhood favourite as an adult and in another language. You see all kinds of things you didn't see before. I've already pondered Uncle Andrew's willingness to use children in scientific experiments; now I'm contemplating Uncle Andrew's ability to convince himself, through use of alcohol and dressing his best, that a beautiful witch is in love with him. C.S. Lewis said this was a very grown-up type of silliness. Why, yes.

But another thing I have noticed is how vividly Jadis (the beautiful witch) speaks, and how what she says in Polish sticks in my memory. This is a bit unfortunate, as Jadis does not say things that you can say in polite conversation at Polish weddings, e.g. "SŁUGO!" ("You minion!").

Jadis, the last survivor of a civil war she waged against her "przeklęta" ("accursed") sister, describes the river flowing with blood, and herself pouring out the blood of her soldiers like water ("Potwór," mutters Polly, which means "monster", so is also useless for weddings), and what she said to her sister before wiping out the joint (i.e. "Tak, zwycięstwo, tylko że nie twoje!")

In Chapter 5, Jadis was awe-inspiring, but now in Chapter 6, she is rather funny. I think this is partly because instead of speaking English in Uncle Andrew's cozy London row house, she is speaking Polish. And just as some Poles first arrive in the United Kingdom with antiquated ideas of what the United Kingdom is like, so does Jadis.

"Procure for me at once a chariot or a flying carpet or a well-trained dragon, or whatever is usual for royal and noble persons in your land," says the Queen of Charn to Uncle Andrew.

When I first I heard these exact words at my mother's knee, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Jadis would expect such transportation in Victorian London, which she knew not at all. But after reading Polish Jadis demand, "Postaraj się natychmiast o rydwan (chariot) lub latający dywan (flying carpet) albo o dobrze wytresowanego smoka (well-trained dragon)....," I giggled.

Possibly my adult giggles are unfair to Jadis as my GREAT DREAM is to ride over vast acres of Polish countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh until I am terribly cold and then am returned to the warmth of a long, low country house called a dwór where I am given delicious clear red soup to drink and crunchy krokiety to munch. So far this has NEVER HAPPENED--partly because I am never in Poland in the dead of winter, but also partly because my own Polish friends never seem to have horses. They are utterly mechanised and given a choice would probably purchase snowmobiles, which is not the same thing at all.

Where was I?

Right, Chapter 6. Well,  I must say that a chapter a week is very slow going, but it is much better for my brains than just plowing through a book without looking up all the unknown words, let alone memorising the most useful of them. I read both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in Polish in that skimming fashion, and although this might not have been totally useless, it certainly did not improve my speaking skills. However,  working so hard on Chapters 1 through 5 of The Magician's Nephew has certainly increased my oral vocabulary. At any rate, I say "w każdym razie" instead of "at any rate", which I tended to say an awful lot.

While reading something about language acquisition this week, I started to think about using all the knowledge about learning languages I have acquired--after six years of messing around with Polish--to begin learning Urdu. After reading up on Urdu, however, I decided that 2018 would not be the year. One thing I had forgotten was how difficult the first year of learning a non-Romance language is , and I was reminded when I looked at the Urdu alphabet.

The Urdu alphabet has "up to 58 letters", which is a depressing thought, and Urdu is written from right to left, which is not so depressing as it is unnerving.  While reading about this, I was suddenly reminded of my first foray into Polish, which was pronouncing "Przepraszam" ("Pardon me").  Now I can say prze and przy and szcz and styczeń without a problem, but it took a lot of painful and embarrassing work.

Do I have time for Urdu? No, I do not. And when I mentioned this to Benedict Ambrose, he cried out in dismay against the whole idea. He thinks learning Urdu is entirely impractical and was not swayed by the news that those who master Urdu can easily understand Hindi, too. Of course, he also thought Polish was terribly impractical, and yet who was it who explained to his battered Polish roommate in the neurology ward that the police needed to keep his clothing for evidence? Me. So there.