Almost at a Milestone

"Is it true," demanded a former classmate when we bumped into her in the street, "that you have read a whole book in Polish?"

She said this as though I had climbed Mount Everest or participated in Dancing with the Stars.

"Oh," I said, thinking back. "Well, sort of. I read through one and a half Harry Potter books, but I gave up looking up all the words I didn't know."

Or words to that effect. I didn't ask, "Who told you that?" because it didn't matter. I must have bragged in some class or other and word trickled to Edinburgh Uni's night school's other Polish-language obsessives. As most of them could tell you, your not-always-so-humble correspondent advanced quickly in reading skills despite being barely able to string together a sentence, so I am not actually the laughing-stock I have often thought I must be.

That said, people have laughed. I probably dropped that casual reference to reading (skimming) Harry Potter to stave off despair.

Typically, I forgot that I had also read Baltic: Pies który płynał na krze (Baltic: the Dog Who Sailed on an Ice-floe) with the most obsessed of the Polish language obsessives one summer, with strict attention to looking up all the words I didn't know and making vocabulary lists for everyone else, plus quizzes. And since then some simpler children's books, too.

But, anyway, what I actually want to say is that I have read and listened to the end of Siostrzeniec Czarodzieja (The Magician's Nephew), and now all that remains is to

A) look up the dramatically smaller lists of words I don't know;
B) memorize them;
C) continuing re-testing myself on the previous lists.

There are two big elephants in this room (as there literally are in Siostrzeniec Czarodzieje):

1. I do not know which words I have been assiduously studying are commonly used in Polish conversation;

2. Although I have been listening to the CD almost daily, my pronunciation is still way off, e.g.

Me: "Is nieustannie used in everyday speech?"

PPS: Nieustannie. 

Me: Nee-oo-STAN-ee-eh.

PPS: Nieustannie. 

This is why textbooks and teachers continue to be important in language studies. Textbooks are the result of scientific linguistic studies, and so they specialise in everyday speech. Teachers can sometimes be relied upon to fix your accent. (Sometimes they give up.) The Polish language obsessive with the best accent in Edinburgh (unless someone with a better one has come along during my exile from the classroom) is married to a Pole who corrects her accent all day.

What reading books in another language does, if you look up all the words you don't know, and make progress in memorising many of them, is make you better at reading books in another language and  using the dictionary. (Using a Polish dictionary effectively is a learned skill, let me tell you.)

Does it make you a better speaker? Yes--to an extent. I have a much bigger reading vocabulary than I did 13 weeks ago, and I have a somewhat bigger speaking vocabulary, thanks to using the words I memorised in conversations with my Polish tutor.

However, I have decided that after I have finished testing and retesting myself on Narnia vocabulary at the end of February, I will stop memorising vocabulary from literature. Instead I will continue reading novels, but memorise textbook vocabulary. That way I will shove the most practical words into the forefront of my memory without losing the discipline of reading.

Every modern European language is actually four languages: the language as spoken, the language as heard, the language as written, and the language as read. This is why I can walk into a Polish folk museum and gleefully read the labels without being able to have a learned discussion in Polish about what I have just read or, indeed, to thoroughly understand a lecture on it.

The bright side of this is that if you are a university student and you don't care about the spoken language side of things, you just want to read never-translated Polish papers by Karol Wojtyła (for example), then you can concentrate solely on reading and looking stuff up in the dictionary, and reach your primary goal.

Or, if you don't care about reading, you just want to make travel easier, you can concentrate on conversation, as home-study kits always do, and have a nicer, less frustrating time.

If, however, you wish to pass the European Union C-2 exam, you have to do everything: read, write, speak, listen. Blah. It's so much work, it makes me sad just thinking about it.

Sometimes I look at the task I have set for myself, and I feel totally overwhelmed. I have to actively remind myself that every big task can be divided into little tasks, and there is no point in rushing a process that takes years.

As in the stages of learning how to draw, there are no shortcuts to learning a language. There is just prioritising, which is what polyglots do. Alexander Arguelles is primarily interested in world literature; Benny Lewis is primarily interested in conversations with strangers in bars. Lewis would probably be more fun to talk to in a foreign language while waiting for a plane, but Arguelles is one of the few non-Russians alive to have actually read War and Peace, not just a translation.

The feelings of satisfaction after having a successful conversation in a foreign-to-me language (or  understanding the gist of a randomly selected foreign-to-me book), however, are enormous, and last longer than the thrill of having published a new book, which may be why I use up so much time on language study instead of writing a new book instead.