Are You Fluent Yet?

After living here for 3 years you would think I would be fluent in Polish by  now, but unfortunately that is not the case. After we moved here I had to wait a while to begin lessons, until after Mike's firm got up and running (he was the only one in the office at first!) and they interviewed firms to offer lessons. We moved here in June and I think I began lessons with Cam, the wife of one of Mike's colleagues, in October. We met with Kasia twice a week, once in Cam's house and once in mine. Things were going well for a while but then we didn't seem to be really learning a ton - Kasia taught us a lot of grammar and not so much conversational Polish which is what we needed. Trying to go to the post office, the dry cleaner's, the vegetable stands, etc. where they don't speak a word of English was completely frustrating and made me dread going out shopping and running errands.  After we moved back to the US for 6 months and then returned to Poland, I felt like I had forgotten everything. I signed up for a 2-week intensive course to get back into it - 10 days from 9-12 and it definitely helped me get back into the swing of things. I really liked the school so I decided to begin private lessons with one of the teachers there, so I started going for an hour and a half twice a week with Monika. Even though I found it completely frustrating, Monika never talked to me in English and at the beginning of each lesson she made me tell her in Polish what I had been up to since the last time I saw her. If I ever had a question she would only offer explanations 2 or 3 different ways in Polish, never English. I really struggled with this but I guess it is the best way to actually learn how to speak a foreign language. Plus I think I took it more seriously since I was actually in a classroom and not in the comfort of my living room. One time she had to call me on my cellphone and I was actually shocked to hear her speaking English! Unfortunately after about 6 months Monika stopped teaching at the school. It was nearing the summer so I decided to take a break, but once we got back to Krakow in August I texted her and was happy to find out that she could give me private lessons if I wanted. So now we are back to meeting twice a week at a local coffee shop. Polish is SO hard but I am glad to be back to lessons because I really really want to learn how to communicate with people because it is so frustrating when I can't. Before we moved here I was under the impression that many more people spoke English than they actually do. The kids go to an English-speaking school and Mike works with a lot of Polish people but they all speak perfect English so I am really the only one who needs to know how to speak it. When we were young my parents sent us to German lessons at their German club and I remember thinking back then that German was so an impossible language to learn (because I never learned a thing!) - little did I know that Polish would be so much worse. When we first started using Asia our cleaning lady, we learned that she had lived in Germany and could speak a bit of German.  Whenever she tried to talk to me I found myself telling her speak in German because it was easier for me to figure out what word she was saying and then put it into Google translate - because when you hear a Polish word, it is almost impossible to figure out how to spell it! For example, Wroclaw is pronounced Vratswov, Lodz is pronounce Woodge, dziesiec is pronounce juh-sinch etc. etc.  Or if you want to say 'with', it's just the letter 'z' (because yeah, that's logical), so I get confused a lot because I think the word they are trying to say begins with a z so I get totally thrown off - and usually they are speaking so fast, 'firing words out like a machine gun' as one of my Polish friends put it, that it's totally impossible for me to understand any more than one or two words of a sentence. This morning I was pretty proud of myself because I received a phonecall and the man did not speak a word of Polish and I understood what he was saying. I knew he was a courier who had a package for me, and that I owed 200 Polish zloty in customs tax (more on this later). However, I was positive he said he would arrive at 1 pm, but it turns out he was on his way over so when he arrived 15 minutes later I had no cash on me. I frantically searched though the kids' wallets but only found 160 pln, so I asked the guy if I could drive to the bank down the street and get 100 pln. Although in reality I spoke more like a caveman to him (Me! drive! bank! need 100!) but he just laughed and nodded his head and followed me in the car.

I do most of my shopping at the organic stores and a lot of the products are German, which despite never learning any German, has proven much easier to figure out: blaubeere = blueberry (the Polish word is jagoda), karotte=carrot (Polish is marchewka), honig=honey (Polish is miod), mit apfelmus= with applesauce (Polish is z jablkowy sosem).... Of course they usually slap a big Polish sticker over the German words so this doesn't always work for me. Sigh. I do not understand at all why a dentist is called a 'dentysta", yet a dentistry office is called 'stomatologia'.  There are so many of these offices scattered around that I always thought Polish people must have lots of stomach issues. Or when I was shopping for something at a sporting goods store and the clerk said he would go check the 'magazyn' for what a needed - so I assumed he was checking the catalog and I would have to order it. But 'magazyn' actually means 'warehouse' or 'storage room', so he came out of the back with what I was looking for. And then there is some weird rule where you have to change proper names based on the verb in the sentence (or whatever the rule is) - so every day I drive by a huge billboard of David Beckham in his undies (not intentionally, I swear) and it calls him "Davida Beckhama". Huh?? Speaking of billboards, there are SO many around (one of the things I think makes Poland ugly - that and all the chain link fences, and the grey and delapidated Communist-era buildings everywhere) - but it helps me to practice my Polish while I am driving. Yet if I don't know a word I can't always stop to google-translate it (and forget trying to remember the word to type in later - too many consonants all thrown together).  When we first moved here there was a word 'myjnia' that I saw everywhere - come to find out it means wash, posted on signs for car washes. But to this day whenever I read it I hear in my head 'MY NINJA!' and I just can't get it out.
In very rare instances Polish can be easy, like when the Polish language inventors got lazy and just decided to throw a  'y'  on the end of words. Like, komputery, zippery, chipsy, legginsy, ha! Or when they feel like making life easy for us foreigners and name a tennis court 'korty tenisowe'. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen too often but it does make me giggle when I see it. I will keep trudging along, but unfortunately I am not sure I will ever be able to master the language.