Overcoming Yet Another Temptation To Quit

On Easter Monday I popped by the Odeon and saw that a Polish film is playing. This cinema often carries Polish films, not because it is artsy (it isn't), but because of the large Polish minority that lives in Edinburgh. Although I knew nothing about Kobieta sukcesu ("Successful Woman"), it had been a long time since I saw a Polish film, and I thought it would be a fruitful use of 90 minutes of my time.

I walked out well before the 90 minutes were up. 

Every nation has the right to make lousy films to entertain the less reflective and more easily entertained of its countrymen, I told myself later. Hollywood produces stupid movies all the time. Possibly Canada does, too. 

On the other hand, neither Canada nor Hollywood produces films that suggest that belief in premarital chastity is only for shamefully stupid bumpkins from the countryside, and only shamefully stupid bumpkins would believe that an engaged couple wouldn't be living together, having sex before marriage, etc., etc.  When the heroine's loving uncle and aunt turn up in Warsaw and utter these stupidities, I finally walked out. And I had had much to bear before then, believe me. 

I hate the idea that virtuous behaviour is laughable. I really, really hate it. I hate it because such an attitude is demonstrably bad for society, especially for the children of that society.  The children, the poor--everyone vulnerable. 

Besides that, I was disappointed that I had a hard time understanding the dialogue of the film at all. Ironically enough, this was partly because of the English subtitles. I find it very hard to hear what people are ACTUALLY saying in film when English subtitles pop up on a screen. It's not quite as bad in Italian, but Polish sentence structure is significantly different from English sentence structure, and I find it very hard to think in English and Polish simultaneously. However, I assume also that I had a general defect in understanding, which is terribly frustrating after six years of trying to learn this stuff. 

On Sunday I asked a European scientist who has been living in Edinburgh for some years now, how long it took her to stop having to think about English actively and just be able to understand and speak without thinking it all out. She said that it was sometime in her second year here. That was very crushing for me, for that meant it took over a year of immersion in an English-speaking city for a well-educated woman to get to that point. 

This is in part why I went to see this stupid film: to get a little extra immersion. However, I see that this was a big mistake in terms of morale. 

One thing the "Fluent in Three Months" school of thought advises is to pick your vocabulary.  This is because it is actually impossible to be fluent in three months unless you are a child in an immersion environment. It takes the native anglophone who is doing nothing but study for eight hours a day approximately 11 months to become fluent in a Slavic language. Therefore, if you want to start having proper conversations in your target language sooner rather than later, you have to think out what you are most likely to want to talk about.

Because I am never going to act out the unlikely scenarios of Polish comedies, there is really no point in watching them. My goals are to be able to function linguistically as a tourist, as a wedding guest, and as a reporter on the Polish pro-life movement, and then to be able to read Polish literature written after January 1863. I can already do this to some extent, but naturally I have endless room for improvement. The big question is--is it endless or will I hit a wall? Without immersion, is it psychologically possible to speak and listen with C-level fluency?