Brain-changer

Student not working to his capability.

Yesterday afternoon Benedict Ambrose and I went to a lunch party to celebrate Palm Sunday and the Feast of the Annunciation. There were almost a dozen guests, including a relatively recent newcomer to the Edinburgh Extraordinary Form, to whom I have never really had a chance to speak. BA's and my after-Mass social life was much curtailed last year by BA's awful illness, and he still hasn't regained his old energy levels.

However, I was very interested in speaking to this newcomer, in part because newcomers to the Trad Scene are congenial company, but largely because he is a native speaker of Polish. As I've pointed out to my Polish tutor, who feels guilty for being paid for conversations she enjoys, there are many language-learning skills I can develop on my own, but spontaneous Polish dialogue is not among them. 

Speaking languages at parties that few others around can understand is not exceedingly polite. However, occasionally at after-Mass gatherings the Poles or the French-speakers or the German-speakers do have tete-a-tetes in their beloved languages. And so after two glasses of sherry and some interesting chat in English about the development of modern Polish, I asked my surprised interlocutor if we might converse in Polish. 

Amusingly, after my good-natured acquaintance agreed to this plan, he listened to my Polish with a palpable intensity akin to mine when I listen to anyone speak Polish. I assume that I am going to speak Polish with a heavy Canadian accent for as long as I live, but I don't mind as long as I am intelligible. And I seemed to be intelligible, and I understood about 75% of what he said. That, let me tell you, is a massive improvement. 

It's curious, this language building. It is a LOT of work, just as becoming a wiry amateur boxer was a lot of work. But on the other hand, its results come as a surprise. Counting vocabulary cards is easy, but it is difficult to quantify how much your conversation skills have improved. 

While watching a clip from "Riverdale", I saw that Jughead's school records--held against him by Sheriff Keller--were almost legible. I found a screenshot online (above), and I had to laugh because although I did do SOMEWHAT better than TV-Jughead in some courses (and worse in others), the straight As across the board in English, with less impressive grades everywhere else, looked all too familiar. 

Which brings me back again to my post-graduate lesson that hard, hard work can make up for a lack of natural talent. And also to my conviction that externals matter, and what you listen to, watch, experience and speak about shapes your brain and thus your mind and character, too. The Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan invited his readers to watch themselves thinking; I'm watching my brain change, especially the part connected to my ears. 

Not a lot of language skills are immediately transferrable, by the way. You can memorise 2,000 vocabulary words from flashcards and not be able to pronounce them correctly, let alone string them into fluid sentences. However, forcing myself to listen to Polish audiobooks has led both to easier comprehension of Poles speaking Polish (fellow foreigners speaking Polish, not so much) and to hearing recorded lyrics. The latter skill is perhaps not all that relevant, but it is a palpable improvement in my ability to process what I hear.

My goal of ready fluency does not seem quite so elusive these days. One Polish acquaintance who came to the UK with almost no English at all (having not worked much at school) eventually learned to speak it very well, with an accent, yes, but also picking up colloquial Scottish words. When I asked him what changed, he said it was as if a switch in his brain had flipped. 

It's been six years of study, and the switch hasn't flipped for me, but I think it eventually will.   

Language advice bonus: Write online about a country or countries where your target language is spoken. If something you write pleases native speakers of your target language greatly, one or two of them may translate it and pose it online so their non-English-speaking countrymen may enjoy it, too. I just discovered this piece translated into what looks to me like very good Polish. I've read only 350 words of the translation so far, but it seems to be faithful to what I actually wrote and perhaps even preserves my style.

Update: Cancel that. When the first-person narrative begins, I am turned into a man. In Polish, unlike in English, you can always tell if a speaker is male or female from the verb endings. For some unfathomable reason, the translator assumed I was male. Although disappointing, this adds to my motivation to reach the official European Union C1 or C2 level in Polish. Then I can translate all my work likely to be of interest to Poles myself. 

The one problem with this, however, is that I am not sure it is psychologically possible to reach C1 or C2 without an immersion situation.  Polish Pretend Son is definitely at the C2 level, but then he lived in the UK for five years or so and is writing a doctoral dissertation that frequently cites American philosophers.