Poland, Italy, and then back In New York after years abroad

[drp9341]

UPDATE ON MY POLISH - IT'S NO LONGER RUSTY!

Hey guys, so I think I finally have most of my Polish back. Obviously there's things I forgot, but there's actually a ton of new things I learned these last 11 days, I think it's "evened out," to put it mathematically:
amount of Polish forgotten ≤ (less than or equal to) amount of Polish learned + amount of Polish remembered.

INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS:
1.) I'm learning things that I was ignoring in the past - stuff I was either subconsciously ignoring, or ignoring because I wasn't interested for some reason.
For example, I have been saying, "z kartą" when asked "cash or card" but today I actually asked two shopkeepers that I'm familiar with, "do people say, 'z kartą' or does it sound weird" his response was, "well it makes sense, it's correct." I responded, "Yes, but would a Polish person ever say that? It sounds weird right?" and him and the girl working said, "Yeah it does, we say just, 'Karta' or 'Kartą' some people say 'z Karty' but 'z kartą' also makes sense, but no one says that." I was laughing with them, I find this helps when you ask 'strangers' / 'acquaintances' for help with Polish. I get the vibe that most people don't want to come off as pedantic or condescending, and are generally very 'motivating' in the sense that they wan't to only say good things about your Polish, so as not to discourage you from continuing to learn it or hurt your confidence.
another weird example: I finally looked up if the Czech Republic was "Czech" in the dopełniacz and "Czechy" in the nominitive case. Same situation with the word for Germany. I don't know why I didn't look up a declension table to see if I was saying it right way. Maybe I was too interested in 'collecting' new words, rather than refining what I already knew.

2.) TONS of new words and expressions are "just sticking" - I don't need to study MANY words / expressions, I just hear/see them once and start using them in conversation.
I think this is because I've probably been exposed to these certain words / expressions in the past, but I never "learned" them. It's really cool though. Lots of these words are words that I "couldn't learn" because it wasn't worth the time it would take. What I mean is, these are words that I deemed weren't super useful for conversation, and are difficult to understand, since there these words don't exist in English, for example: "dopóki" which means "until" or "while" if you look it up in the dictionary.
Sentences like, "Zostań z przodu dopóki nie znajdziemy zjazdu." Literal translation: Stay in front until we're not finding the highway exit. Translation: Stay in front of us until we find the exit. There's tons of words / collocations like this. In the beginning, I tried to "memorize" the low hanging fruit, and "familiarize myself" with the more complex stuff - unless it was a common word/collocation. If after 5 months of living in Poland I saw it for the first time, while reading the fine print on an advertisement on the tram that I wasn't interested in, I was going to just look it up, and maybe put it in Anki, and half-ass the review when I saw it / just click "bury" when I saw the card .


My new / current "FORMAL STUDY ROUTINE"
I'm doing Assimil Le Polonais sans peine. I opened up lesson 61 on the PDF the other day when I was erasing old files to free up hard drive space, and put on the audio. There were a few new words, and there were great expressions that if I memorized would make speaking a lot easier, since I would be able to repeat these expressions, and not have to perform 'language-grammar-math' in my head while conversing. Also, the audio is really good in these later lessons, in terms of them speaking fast to get used to prosody / people speaking fast.

WARNING: THERE ARE PRONUNCIATION ERRORS my girlfriend hates the Assimil Polish voice actors, she just doesn't like the guys voice for some reason. She agreed to listen to lesson 61, and she said it was really perfect, except that she suspects that these people who did the recording did very little, or no voice acting before recording the course, (she's an actress / singer and has done lots of voice acting in the past.) She said that they're making the common beginner mistake of trying to say things too correctly, since they're being recorded, and they (ironically) end up saying stuff incorrectly. For example, the stress on the Polish word for Dinosaur (Dinozaur) should be 'Dinozaur' but the voice actor says it like 'Dinozaur'. She said that the audio is good for listening comprehension and rhythm though, but just be careful about some small details.

My Assimil Schedule is: 3 new lessons per week, with lots of focus on shadowing the audio, and on translating from L2->L1 and then back to L1->L2. It's pretty easy, I just have to remember the exact expressions used. However, this is my first week doing this. I'm taking it slow. I only have 37 lessons left, and I don't want to have to go back and keep reviewing the lessons in order to not forget everything. I get tons of exposure to new words every day from tons of other sources. Also, I've been consuming more and more Polish media like News and Blogs, so I learn lots of new stuff from that.

I'm also back into Anki, I've been using it every day for last 4(woohoo! success!) days. However, I am pretty invested in it. I feel that this time I will actually be able to stick to it.

That's all guys! I'm reading a book in Italian at night in order to fall asleep faster, but aside from that, I've been studying Italian in a quite unstructured and unorganized way. When I start my job in September I will figure out a routine for that.

GERMAN I also want to start doing 2 lessons of Assimil German a week this year. I want to try to do it for two months, and see how I manage it. The reason I finally settled on German, is because if I stay in Europe, it's important that I know German, and I have German speaking friends, plus I want to get a foothold in the Germanic languages, and German seems to make the most sense. I already learned German to probably an A2/B1 level about 5 (I think) years ago, so it's not "totally new." Also, when I was a teenager I liked the German language a lot. I would listen to German music, and try to learn random German words. Strangely, as a teenager I never had any "goals." I wasn't trying to learn German. I just liked the way it sounded, so I listened to it and learned random words.Basically, due to all these factors, German isn't totally "foreign" to me the way Russian is. Regarding Arabic, I think I'm going to put that on the back-burner. MSA is just to complicated to be learned "on the side" while focusing on Polish, and learning a dialect is just as complicated, not linguistically, but resources and trying to explain to speakers of that dialect that your interested in the DIALECT and NOT MSA is difficult in non-linguistic ways lol.


Alright everyone, I hope you enjoyed this post! Have a great day, and thanks for reading!

[Axon]

Dude, you are such an inspiration. I think a lot about how to improve my studying and what I'd like to be able to do with my languages, and then I read one of your posts and you've been doing exactly that thing with great success.

I have a lot of the same struggles learning Mandarin that you have with Polish. Odd voice (maybe that's only Russian for you), tough reading, limited specialized active vocabulary. Except you're attacking the problems at their core, putting in the time and effort, and seeing great results. On top of that you're incredibly fluent in like four other languages already. Mad respect.

[drp9341]

Dude, you are such an inspiration. I think a lot about how to improve my studying and what I'd like to be able to do with my languages, and then I read one of your posts and you've been doing exactly that thing with great success.

I have a lot of the same struggles learning Mandarin that you have with Polish. Odd voice (maybe that's only Russian for you), tough reading, limited specialized active vocabulary. Except you're attacking the problems at their core, putting in the time and effort, and seeing great results. On top of that you're incredibly fluent in like four other languages already. Mad respect.

Thank you man I genuinely appreciate that, no joke.

Voice is a weird thing bro. I supposedly sound way different in Italian than I do in English. I have a friend who I had only spoke Italian to, and when he heard me speak English for the first time, (after like 3 months of knowing each other,) his reaction was absolutely hilarious, (his English is incredibly good, the best I've ever heard from an Italian.) Italian is a strange one for me, since it's basically a heritage language, so I don't understand why my voice would be that different. Supposedly my Polish voice is the same, but I think that's because my girlfriend was ruthless with my pronunciation in the beginning, (it was revenge for me making fun of all of her mistakes, in the end we both benefitted though lol.) Also my voice in Spanish is the same? I'm just "nicer" when I speak Spanish. Portuguese I've been told my voice is different also, and I don't have any close friends who are native in European French, so I have no idea.

I think you should find a Chinese friend who has no problem breaking your balls, there's a time and place for politeness, and there's a time and place to cut the sh*t and get to work. Practice making all the sounds while using your vocal cords in a similar way to English. You're going to sound different, but you won't be putting on a fake accent. If you want to talk more about this PM me. I studied Speech Pathology for 5 years at college, and have a real hard on for phonetics, especially the mechanics behind articulation.

My fluency in my other languages vary wildly though depending on my situation. I was interviewed in Spanish for an Argentinian podcast (while in Warsaw - the week before I came back to the US,) and I sent a 5 minute snippet to a Mexican friend of mine who's a real grammar nazi, and I was amazed not at the fact I made mistakes, but at the mistakes that I made. I made basic mistakes, even though my fluency and accent remained the same. I said "era" instead of "fuera" and "es buen tiempo" It was straight Polish interference, and just being rusty, but I think I need to maintain one Romance language alive, and use it at a high-level in order to not allow minimize cross-family interference. I'm choosing Italian now, and since reading is the hardest thing for me to do in Italian, read I shall.

However, I don't think it is possible to ever keep all of your languages perfect. I'm consciously trying to step away from perfectionism. When I was in Poland, every time I would write on here, or write a long text, I would have to re-write almost every sentence like 3 times because my word order was just so strange. "I'm left in the apartment my coat." ---- That's pure Polish interference, and I lived in the US until I was 23, spending only summers abroad, and the occasional 5 day trip to Italy during the school year for a funeral. Now imagine trying to stay native in like 10 languages? Anyone who manages that probably wouldn't be leading a life I'd envy.

[drp9341]

TWO DAYS IN THE US, THEN OFF TO POLAND



I am deciding to take Italian seriously, but not in the way one might assume...
My Italian, as I've discussed before, is very strange. This year I made friends with Italians who are not from Lucca, Tuscany, and they said my Italian is very strange. I mess up the prepositions, and I say things that are from my grandparents village, not even Lucca, never mind Tuscany.

I spent a lot of time listening closely to my grandmother, and recording her without her knowledge, after trying multiple times to get her to record things for me, but she ends up speaking slowly, and paying very close attention to how she speaks. When she gets mad I get the best recordings. My father and grandfather don't talk much, and when they do it's about work, so they mix in tons of English words. Regardless, I asked tons and tons of questions, I said stuff that I know is "wrong" in Italian, and asked them how they would say it, and they all agreed that's how you are supposed to say it.

So I actually went through the wikipedia page for Lucchese, and Toscano, in Italian, and am trying to figure out what are anglicisms, what are "village-isms" and what is correct. I know what to work on, and I am focusing on having non-tuscans correct my spoken and written output. I'm not focusing on losing pronunciation or on well-known Tuscan features, such as, "noi si fa" instead of "noi facciamo," but I am trying to stop saying things like "me lo riordo uelli tempi" (me lo ricordo quelli tempi) or "Umbiscaro" etc. etc.

Next summer, I'm going to go to a "Corso di Dizione" where actors etc. go in order to learn to speak "without a regional accent." Obviously, I won't have a perfect TV accent, nor will I loose my American accent, but hopefully this will help, and it's a step in the right direction.

My Accent in Spanish is now very American
When I've been speaking to Spanish speakers, they've been wide-eyed asking how I learned so much Spanish. This is a bad sign. Before I moved to Poland, Spanish speakers would calmly ask where I'm from, or usually just say nothing. I decided to get some "neutral opinions" and I got 3 sessions of instant tutoring on iTalki, they confirmed that sometimes I sound native, (Central America) but that generally one can tell that I'm American. I didn't really make any mistakes though, even with the subjunctive, I did forget some words though, but I just worked around it, it felt like my Spanish was a little slower, and my mouth and tongue weren't in the right places.


POLISH IS ON TRACK


I am working on speaking more "standard" English also, why not. I'm just paying attention to TV more, and it's helping. I don't want to lose my NY accent entirely, though.

[Ani]

I'm super curious about your accent work. I'm going to read back through some of your log, and I hope you'll continue to post specifics about how you handle what you're doing.

I personally think you should keep your NY accent. I grew up in NE New Jersey and tried not to talk through all of highschool so no one would make fun of my accent. Later on I embraced it, but married a man who speaks almost exactly General American so I've lost a lot of it. Realizing it's gone feels a little like giving up on my roots.

[cjareck]

Exactly! Keep the accent. I am from Toruń, which was during 1793-1920 under German rule and my wife is from a village that was from 1795-1915 under Russian rule. We see the differences in accent and vocabulary quite often. But she said that only once someone told her that she undoubtedly is from the eastern part of Poland (that were under Russian rule).

What concerns socialising with Polish friends - when I was younger I didn't drink with them, but this was not an easy task Nevertheless, if you wish to practice Polish, my Skype login is the same as here.

[drp9341]

I'm super curious about your accent work. I'm going to read back through some of your log, and I hope you'll continue to post specifics about how you handle what you're doing.

I personally think you should keep your NY accent. I grew up in NE New Jersey and tried not to talk through all of highschool so no one would make fun of my accent. Later on I embraced it, but married a man who speaks almost exactly General American so I've lost a lot of it. Realizing it's gone feels a little like giving up on my roots.

It really is interesting.I stuttered really bad growing up, but now I can control it to the point that most people don’t know. I grew up in an Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx, and I never knew I had an accent until I was maybe 16. I knew that my dad and that a lot of guys did, but I thought that I spoke normally, since TV sounded normal, and my Dad, other friends, uncles etc. sounded very “New York.”

I was 16, and I was in Oklahoma with my Egyptian relatives, and me and my friend went camping with his girlfriend and his friends. They all kept saying how I had such a strong accent. I became self conscious and thought it must be because of my stuttering, because with the exception of maybe one girl I couldn’t hear any difference between the way I and they spoke.

When I came back I tried to speak more “clearly” and I noticed that my Italian American friends spoke “the least clearly” and that my friends with parents from either Ireland / Canada / the Midwest etc. spoke super clearly. (I went to a VERY Irish / Irish-American Highschool.)

When I went to Uni in NE Ohio I realized that people loved my accent, and I actually tried to make it stronger for the first 2 years. My last 3 years I stopped 100% caring about it.

After my 4th year of college, I went on a 10 study trip and spent the trip “hanging out” with one girl I met on the trip. When I went back to Ohio 4 weeks after the trip was over, we spent two nights together and she was shocked at my accent. I worked construction for those 4 weeks, (those who work in the construction field almost always have very heavy accents. I tried to not change the way I spoke, but I didn’t focus that hard on it, and I consumed probably ~90+% of my media in Spanish.

On the car ride to Columbus Ohio, I sent my friend who I was staying with, (my ex-roomate, who I used as a reference during all of Phonetics Classes, so he knew the drill,) lots of voice messages of me trying to speak like I used to. After the end of the 4 days with 5 out of our 7 Roomates, plus tons of other friends who showed up, I was speaking more “softly.” I have been trying to keep that, as I know I got the intonation down after that long weekend. I just need to pay attention to the pronunciation of individual words.

I’ll never be able to loose my accent 100% and keep it that way forever, but I would like to speak like my younger cousin, people know he’s from NYC after one sentence, but it’s not in your face.

[cjareck]

Perhaps you do not know about this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k[
She could learn various accents, so this at least proves that such a thing is possible.
(unfortunately embedding youtube was too hard for me )

[drp9341]

I've been back in Poland for one week!
MY POLISH HAS GOTTEN WAAAY WORSE.
It's incredible how much worse my Polish has gotten. It's now, (after a 4 days of almost complete immersion, including TV and Books only in Polish), almost back to where it was - I think.

These are the areas I've gotten worse in
1. New Vocabulary - any words / expressions I learned roughly 4 weeks before leaving for the US, I've forgotten, (except what I learned my last 5 days in Poland). It's like my brain went back subconsciously and started erasing all the "new" stuff I learned.
***I did the Goldlist method for the first time ever starting 5 days before I left Poland, and I have been using that notebook a lot. I'm no longer making new Goldlists, as I'm getting back into Anki, but the method is great, and I'm working on the 9 or so 'Goldlists' that I made until they become "Gold."

2. Intuition / ability to easily, intuitively differentiate words that for an Anglophone are similar, (Zdanie, vs. Zadanie)
I forgot which was which Jedz (yets) eat! vs. Jedź (yech) drive! which are basic words. It's like my brain went back to the way it processed words when I first started learning Polish.

3. Sentence Rhythm / Linking words. For example, if I read a sentence, and then a native says that same sentence, the way I hear it in my head is waaay off. The timing and stress is totally off. This has lead to LISTENING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS. Funnily enough, I can still pronounce individual words / fixed expressions 90% as well as I did before.

4. Basic Vocabulary (nouns!) This happens in every language, even our native language. This was the one I was most prepared for.


Basically, it seems that my skills have gotten rustier than my "memory." I guess you could say my "procedural knowledge" has been lost to a certain degree. It's quite extreme though. I haven't been this bad at Polish since probably last November, even though I obviously know (declarative knowledge) more verbs, declensions, nouns, expressions, sentence structures etc.

I "speed learned" Polish, so I know that this is what happens, however it is scary to see how much my skills really declined. If I was to stop speaking Polish tomorrow, I bet that within 18 months I would probably forget almost everything. I guess slow and steady wins the race. That's why when I get to a C1 level, I am not going to prioritize a new language for at least a couple of months. I think I need to give Polish at least another 2 years to "marinate" into my brain, or everything I worked for these last 14 months will be for nothing.

Where I'm at now: Me and my girlfriend started binge-watching Wataha, (I've seen it before, she hasn't,) and I put the subtitles in Polish, so I can see what I don't understand. I'm putting probably 20-30 words per episode into Anki. A lot of the time, I pause and repeat things a few times. The first time I hear it, I understand it but it sounds weird. Then after I hear it said a few times, it gets "locked into my brain" and it sounds normal. Obviously my girlfriend doesn't love that it takes 60 minutes to watch a 45 minute show, (between Anki, asking her questions, and repeated random 5 second fragments of dialog 6 times lol) but she's obviously okay with it. Honestly, I think watching that show was the best thing for my Polish, even better than conversations, because I could go back and listen to things a bunch of times, and get reminded of how poles actually speak to each other.

I'll post an update in another week or so, hopefully by then I'll have cut through the rustiness and be improving again!

[drp9341]

UPDATE ON MY POLISH - IT'S NO LONGER RUSTY!

Hey guys, so I think I finally have most of my Polish back. Obviously there's things I forgot, but there's actually a ton of new things I learned these last 11 days, I think it's "evened out," to put it mathematically:
amount of Polish forgotten ≤ (less than or equal to) amount of Polish learned + amount of Polish remembered.

INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS:
1.) I'm learning things that I was ignoring in the past - stuff I was either subconsciously ignoring, or ignoring because I wasn't interested for some reason.
For example, I have been saying, "z kartą" when asked "cash or card" but today I actually asked two shopkeepers that I'm familiar with, "do people say, 'z kartą' or does it sound weird" his response was, "well it makes sense, it's correct." I responded, "Yes, but would a Polish person ever say that? It sounds weird right?" and him and the girl working said, "Yeah it does, we say just, 'Karta' or 'Kartą' some people say 'z Karty' but 'z kartą' also makes sense, but no one says that." I was laughing with them, I find this helps when you ask 'strangers' / 'acquaintances' for help with Polish. I get the vibe that most people don't want to come off as pedantic or condescending, and are generally very 'motivating' in the sense that they wan't to only say good things about your Polish, so as not to discourage you from continuing to learn it or hurt your confidence.
another weird example: I finally looked up if the Czech Republic was "Czech" in the dopełniacz and "Czechy" in the nominitive case. Same situation with the word for Germany. I don't know why I didn't look up a declension table to see if I was saying it right way. Maybe I was too interested in 'collecting' new words, rather than refining what I already knew.

2.) TONS of new words and expressions are "just sticking" - I don't need to study MANY words / expressions, I just hear/see them once and start using them in conversation.
I think this is because I've probably been exposed to these certain words / expressions in the past, but I never "learned" them. It's really cool though. Lots of these words are words that I "couldn't learn" because it wasn't worth the time it would take. What I mean is, these are words that I deemed weren't super useful for conversation, and are difficult to understand, since there these words don't exist in English, for example: "dopóki" which means "until" or "while" if you look it up in the dictionary.
Sentences like, "Zostań z przodu dopóki nie znajdziemy zjazdu." Literal translation: Stay in front until we're not finding the highway exit. Translation: Stay in front of us until we find the exit. There's tons of words / collocations like this. In the beginning, I tried to "memorize" the low hanging fruit, and "familiarize myself" with the more complex stuff - unless it was a common word/collocation. If after 5 months of living in Poland I saw it for the first time, while reading the fine print on an advertisement on the tram that I wasn't interested in, I was going to just look it up, and maybe put it in Anki, and half-ass the review when I saw it / just click "bury" when I saw the card .


My new / current "FORMAL STUDY ROUTINE"
I'm doing Assimil Le Polonais sans peine. I opened up lesson 61 on the PDF the other day when I was erasing old files to free up hard drive space, and put on the audio. There were a few new words, and there were great expressions that if I memorized would make speaking a lot easier, since I would be able to repeat these expressions, and not have to perform 'language-grammar-math' in my head while conversing. Also, the audio is really good in these later lessons, in terms of them speaking fast to get used to prosody / people speaking fast.

WARNING: IN ASSIMIL'S POLISH COURSE THERE ARE PRONUNCIATION ERRORS IN THE AUDIO my girlfriend hates the Assimil Polish voice actors, she just doesn't like the guys voice for some reason. She agreed to listen to lesson 61, and she said it was really perfect, except that she suspects that these people who did the recording did very little, or no voice acting before recording the course, (she's an actress / singer and has done lots of voice acting in the past.) She said that they're making the common beginner mistake of trying to say things too correctly, since they're being recorded, and they (ironically) end up saying stuff incorrectly. For example, the stress on the Polish word for Dinosaur (Dinozaur) should be 'Dinozaur' but the voice actor says it like 'Dinozaur'. She said that the audio is good for listening comprehension and rhythm though, but just be careful about some small details.

My Assimil Schedule is: 3 new lessons per week, with lots of focus on shadowing the audio, and on translating from L2->L1 and then back to L1->L2. It's pretty easy, I just have to remember the exact expressions used. However, this is my first week doing this. I'm taking it slow. I only have 37 lessons left, and I don't want to have to go back and keep reviewing the lessons in order to not forget everything. I get tons of exposure to new words every day from tons of other sources. Also, I've been consuming more and more Polish media like News and Blogs, so I learn lots of new stuff from that.

I'm also back into Anki, I've been using it every day for last 4(woohoo! success!) days. However, I am pretty invested in it. I feel that this time I will actually be able to stick to it.

That's all guys! I'm reading a book in Italian at night in order to fall asleep faster, but aside from that, I've been studying Italian in a quite unstructured and unorganized way. When I start my job in September I will figure out a routine for that.

GERMAN I also want to start doing 2 lessons of Assimil German a week this year. I want to try to do it for two months, and see how I manage it. The reason I finally settled on German, is because if I stay in Europe, it's important that I know German, and I have German speaking friends, plus I want to get a foothold in the Germanic languages, and German seems to make the most sense. I already learned German to probably an A2/B1 level about 5 (I think) years ago, so it's not "totally new." Also, when I was a teenager I liked the German language a lot. I would listen to German music, and try to learn random German words. Strangely, as a teenager I never had any "goals." I wasn't trying to learn German. I just liked the way it sounded, so I listened to it and learned random words.Basically, due to all these factors, German isn't totally "foreign" to me the way Russian is. Regarding Arabic, I think I'm going to put that on the back-burner. MSA is just to complicated to be learned "on the side" while focusing on Polish, and learning a dialect is just as complicated, not linguistically, but resources and trying to explain to speakers of that dialect that your interested in the DIALECT and NOT MSA is difficult in non-linguistic ways lol.


Alright everyone, I hope you enjoyed this post! Have a great day, and thanks for reading!