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

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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Sat Apr 10, 2021 4:27 pm

cjareck wrote:Well, I have to admit, that Drp9341's (at least writing since I've had possibility to check only that) Polish is better than I've expected. Honestly, better than my English. We could discuss various complicated topics and I didn't have to limit myself in vocabulary due to speaking with foreigner. I'm really impressed!

Haha it looks like I'm paying Poles to write reviews :P

Thank you :D Hopefully one day we can speak as well!

Ironically, I had a 1.5hr skype lesson with the first teacher I'm trying on italki. And for the first 20 minutes I was making really simple and big mistakes. I was stuttering a lot, which is odd since I talk on the phone often in Polish. I would have thought it was because of talking on the phone if it started happening after 20~ minutes which is like my MAX time on the phone in Polish in my daily life.

I was stuttering a lot right in the beginning - I no longer know why I stutter when I do. when I was a kid and teenager it was situational but ever since I was around 20 / 21 years old, it's completely random. It can happen when I'm totally relaxed and happy, and not at all when I'm super nervous. Sleep deprivation plays a role, but I've been sleeping great. - Stuttering turns English into speaking a language you're bad at. I start to avoid certain words, rephrase sentences etc. In English I avoid d/t sounds when I stutter and in Italian tr/dr and 'c' sounds. I didn't speak other languages often enough (I've been "afraid" of these sounds since I can remember) to develop sounds I'm afraid of stuttering on. Funnily enough, if I try to hide it, I can make it seem like I am simply not well spoken, but I almost always tell people that I'm stuttering, since I've realized no one cares. and it was probably a good thing I stuttered.. I'll explain below


My Review of the Class
Nice guy, but not used to students who actually speak Polish, and don't want to do a coursebook.
He didn't catch any mistakes besides the really big ones, and didn't write them down. The first few times I said something weird, he repeated the sentence and tried to find the mistake. The first two times he said that the mistake was something I didn't say. I let it go, but told him that if I say something that is wrong but you don't know why just tell me how you would have said that sentence instead, and write it in the chat. He told me okay. The next time he did it again, I asked him, "jakbyś to powiedział?" (how would you say it) and he said he doesn't know, and I said, "Jakbyś wyraził się?" and he looked for a second and then said, that it's more normal to say "jakbyś to powiedział" instead of "jakbyś wyraził się." I said okay.

He's not interested in anything I asked him, and he just wanted me to explain how I learned Polish and stuff like, "do you think vocabulary is more important than grammar?" He was a nice guy, I'm surprised he's teaching Polish online full time though. I didn't ask what he did before, he's an older man, though. I left him a good review and gave him my Whatsapp and showed him Oscar Swan's first year Polish course to do with English speaking students. He was really happy and stayed on half an hour longer to ask me about it, and more questions about what I think of language related stuff. He didn't correct anything in the chat, though. That's a huge thing for me.

If I spoke Russian the way I speak Polish teachers probably wouldn't bat an eye. It sucks Polish is so rarely learned except by a few Ukrainians.

I have another lesson Monday with a Polish girl, this is to work on slang.
I also want corrections though. she said "będę Cię poprawiać, chyba że sam będziesz miał tego dosyć :D" which means "I'm going to correct you, unless you get sick of it yourself" but it can also mean "I'm going to correct you until you get sick of it yourself." I assume it means the second, though they actually mean the same thing.

I want a male Polish teacher my age, or an older dude who is mean and strict, but all the dudes my age seem a little odd, and the only older guy was really nice.

I think I'll make a new profile and only put English and Polish on it if another teacher keeps bringing the conversation back to me speaking more than one language.
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cjareck
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby cjareck » Sat Apr 10, 2021 4:42 pm

drp9341 wrote:Haha it looks like I'm paying Poles to write reviews :P

This one was honest. They say everyone has his/her price, but in my case, it isn't about money for sure.

drp9341 wrote:I asked him, "jakbyś to powiedział?" (how would you say it) and he said he doesn't know, and I said, "Jakbyś wyraził się?" and he looked for a second and then said, that it's more normal to say "jakbyś to powiedział" instead of "jakbyś wyraził się." I said okay.

The phrase "Jakbyś wyraził się?" is wrong. If you made it correct grammatically, this would be "Jakbyś się wyraził?". Nevertheless, it still would be a weird way to ask. If you would use the pattern from the previous question to form the following one: "Jakbyś to wyraził?" it would be natural but slightly formal.
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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:28 pm

cjareck wrote:
drp9341 wrote:Haha it looks like I'm paying Poles to write reviews :P

This one was honest. They say everyone has his/her price, but in my case, it isn't about money for sure.

drp9341 wrote:I asked him, "jakbyś to powiedział?" (how would you say it) and he said he doesn't know, and I said, "Jakbyś wyraził się?" and he looked for a second and then said, that it's more normal to say "jakbyś to powiedział" instead of "jakbyś wyraził się." I said okay.

The phrase "Jakbyś wyraził się?" is wrong. If you made it correct grammatically, this would be "Jakbyś się wyraził?". Nevertheless, it still would be a weird way to ask. If you would use the pattern from the previous question to form the following one: "Jakbyś to wyraził?" it would be natural but slightly formal.


hahah thank you. I corrected my notes. I double checked, and that's what was in the message. He seemed sort of confused when I started speaking. Perhaps it was an off day for him. Like I said, it's a shame that it's seen as so strange that I would want to learn Polish to a respectable level. If it was French or German I'm sure it'd be a different story altogether!
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby Raconteur » Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:03 pm

drp9341 wrote:Haha it looks like I'm paying Poles to write reviews :P
Dude, I'm still waiting for the $20 you were supposed to PayPal me. And I hear cjareck already got his payment, and it was $5 more than mine! What's up with that??
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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Fri Apr 16, 2021 7:45 am

Raconteur wrote:
drp9341 wrote:Haha it looks like I'm paying Poles to write reviews :P
Dude, I'm still waiting for the $20 you were supposed to PayPal me. And I hear cjareck already got his payment, and it was $5 more than mine! What's up with that??


coś za coś.... that's the Polish way, so I've heard :D

Regarding my second lesson:

It went super well. She's a really cool teacher.

For learning all the different meanings in different contexts, I'm using (I finally decided) forum posts. More specifically, "The Misc" of the bbodybuilding forum lol

I found a post with a guy ranting about his "crazy ex" talking about all the insane stuff she has done.

I found another one with a guy talking about different things that will "make you intoxicated" and also talking about the stupid stuff they did.

I translated the first one into Polish. I'm gonna ask her to rewrite it into informal language, (I'll give her the context.)

I might ask another teacher, or maybe a friend here, to try to make the Polish version as formal and polite as possible, while keeping it as close as is socio-linguistically possible.

Then for the second one, I'll try to do it myself. Both for informal and formal.

Then I'll do the same for a third, fourth, fifth, etc. until I either decently understand differences in register, or my teacher just gets sick of grading them, and tells me it's fine ;)

I have more plans for the other "real-life issues" but they mostly come down to vocabulary and memorizing a few sentences that require translation, and then reviewing. However.... I could be totally wrong...

The one that will take the most time, is talking about history, and being able to read it well. I'm still on the wikipedia level. If I can't use my chrome plug in to search single words in the dictionary,even that's hard. It might seem weird that words like, "maile armor" are important to me, but I actually really enjoy listening to, and reading history. Poland's "mainstream" views of many things are very different, academia has sort of come to an agreement to not touch any politically sensitive topics unless they benefit those handing out grants. This is why languages are cool, even if you don't speak it every single day every day, it makes a lot of stuff accessible.
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:14 am

drp9341 wrote:
The one that will take the most time, is talking about history, and being able to read it well. I'm still on the wikipedia level. If I can't use my chrome plug in to search single words in the dictionary,even that's hard. It might seem weird that words like, "maile armor" are important to me, but I actually really enjoy listening to, and reading history. Poland's "mainstream" views of many things are very different, academia has sort of come to an agreement to not touch any politically sensitive topics unless they benefit those handing out grants. This is why languages are cool, even if you don't speak it every single day every day, it makes a lot of stuff accessible.
Adam Zamoyski is a Polish/British historian who writes for the general public, I've only read his Warsaw 1920 book.
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cjareck
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby cjareck » Sun Apr 18, 2021 8:02 am

drp9341 wrote:I might ask another teacher, or maybe a friend here, to try to make the Polish version as formal and polite as possible, while keeping it as close as is socio-linguistically possible.

Maybe put your translation here and we will start working on it. Or just send it to me if it isn't too long ;)
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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Tue May 04, 2021 9:51 pm

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Last edited by drp9341 on Thu Apr 06, 2023 12:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Mon Jun 07, 2021 10:12 pm

I'm back in the USA!!!

I've been back for 2 weeks, but the first week I was preparing for a wilderness trip, and the second week I was with my friends and cousins canoeing down the Allagash for 8 days and nights. It was great. It rained, and it was muddy, and my tent is very old and I got soaked so bad my first night I wasn't dry for the next 3 days, it was great. It's all about morale, just you and your buddies vs. mother nature. Since the quarantine things have been real cushy, so paddling 32kms for 9 hours straight while it's raining in Northern Maine is satisfying in a weird sense. It's humbling. Also, nothing beats joking around all day with your buddies trying to see who can go fastest, watching each other capsize, and then drinking some whiskey around a fire.

Now back to languages. I spoke English for the duration of the trip, and my English was definitely not as "quick" the first few days. It came back though. I woke up to my girlfriend's mom calling me the first morning I was back in a bed and ended up chatting with her for an hour and I sincerely didn't think about the fact it was a different language until she said towards the end that she is so happy to hear I didn't already forget Polish. (I always joke with her family that I'm going to forget overnight magically if they involve me in family drama, so it's been a running joke for a while.) I went to the barbershop today and hadn't seen the guys there in a year, and they were insanely impressed at my Russian. I always come in and say pleasantries in Russian, but I was on the phone with my GF's brother for about 10 minutes about a car while waiting for my turn, and then this Slovakian old guy who was very nice but hard of hearing starting speaking to me in Slovak and I was responding in Polish, and then the Slovakian fella left and a cop walked in so they started speaking Russian to me, and we ended up talking for an hour, going into the back and taking a shot with the owner who I've known forever to welcome me home and for me now being able to speak Russian.

Funny thing is, I never studied Russian outside of chatting with uber drivers and helping out old people occasionally in NYC. What I did all year though, is lookup on google translate Russian words whenever I talked to Uber drivers, and I sincerely thought they only understood me by virtue of them being Ukrainian and Polish being quite close to Ukrainian but the one guy was going on and on about how his sons speak much worse than me, etc. I don't really care much for learning Russian for real right now, but there are some Russian YouTube channels I watch which are like vlogs in clear Russian, but I guess having gotten very comfortable in Polish I got better at Russian also. I would love to speak Russian well, but I am currently renovating my apartment in the building where I'm the super in Yonkers. I didn't take Summer classes at my University, I will wait until the fall, then it's all in person. I suspect people will be much more respectful towards their conjured up fictitious "white devil" when a lack of respect may leave you subject to "close-range oppression." This never had, and still doesn't have anything at all to do with politics, common decency rather. I passed everything with As, and one A-, which is a big surprise.

I guess I'll be speaking Spanish a lot, as the people in my building all speak Spanish to me. I will be trying to improve my Russian whenever it feels fun though. Polish is used daily, as per usual. Italian will probably be used more as my grandparents will be a 5-minute walk from me once I finish the renovation. Life's been good!!!!
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drp9341
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Re: Drp9341 is (accidentally back) in POLAND for another year!!!!

Postby drp9341 » Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:29 am

IMPROVING MY ENGLISH?
Code Switching?
Is writing the answer to being a better communicator?
If you can only express an idea through an idiom, what does that mean?

I have been listening to a lot of very "good speakers" recently. I listened to Trevor Noah and Jordan Peterson's mainly. I had a sort of game with an Italian friend of mine. She is constantly trying to say things using the most obscure words possible, and sometimes I stop her and ask her why she used X instead of Y. She would say that it's "better" and if pressed she would say it's more "cultured." She's been my close friend for like a decade, and I really didn't mind as it improved my vocabulary, and she was the one person who would always win my "corrections for beers" game (look at the posts from when I was in Italy.)

I knew about prescriptivism vs descriptivism and I have a cousin who speaks pure Tuscan but is a real wordsmith and great at holding any group captive, even those who tended to almost always play the "I know more smart-people-words" game. I just wrote it off as something young Italians do to make a good impression. I grew up aware of the stigma that southern dialects held, and I never really paid this any mind. I always thought it was an unfortunate situation, although I remember finding it funny. I think that it's how I grew up, our family would laugh at our quirks. The Irish side would laugh at the ridiculous of some Irish things, (or Irish American.) The same goes for the Italian side of my family as well.

I read Chungs posts about the intensive Czech school in Prague and I actually remember that thread better than perhaps any other forum post I've read. I remember the post about how he gave a speech and used Czech in order to get his message across. He then wrote, from what I remember, that he was asked by his professor that why he used such simple language, and when he explained that he spoke the way he spoke because he wanted to be understood, the teacher told him something along the lines of the language is not the medium, it's the medium and the message; he was to communicate his mastery of the language through the way he spoke. The language was not just a means of communication but a means of communicating his mastery of the language. This is what I remember.

I find with some Italian friends that they learn a crazy word and use it non-stop for a bit then switch onto another obscure word. We all make fun of the people (there are two in particular) who do this.

The whole focusing on the medium as much or more than the actual message is a European thing. I know that it's silly to generalize Europe, but take this an invitation to correct me, I doubt it is so black and white. I want to say that Ireland has a very strong oral tradition, but it seems that it is more of the poetic beauty and delivery of the speech that is valued above all. I am writing this to figure this out, so I'm sure I'm wrong about a lot of stuff.

-----

A quick note on the politicization of accent, identity, and dialects

Fast forward to around a month ago. I was talking to a very close Italo-French (odd, yes.) friend of mine who leans very left on almost every politicized topic that we discuss. He's amazing at English, and very intelligent. If we were to take a standardized exam he would definitely score higher than me. He's also a very skilled polyglot. However, he never bothered to learn certain expressions, (African American expressions, "ebonics" I don't know what to call it.) He is not racist at all, but he would rather learn words like "Acerbic" than a really unique expression that communicates a lot. He just thinks that it's not becoming of a professional to speak that way. - That's something one may expect from someone who one may consider to be sympathetic politically with politics right of center? But from what I see it's the exact opposite in Italy? I don't know...

But this politicization was taken to a new level in New York City.

So my school is the opposite of this. It's MUCH too extreme. According to a poll, only one person, (me) chose "disagree" when presented with the sentence, "There is never an appropriate reason to encourage a student to improve their pronunciation." I also learned that there's no such thing as unintelligible speech. I looked up unintelligible and it's cognates in 3 languages and then asked the professor sincerely if I had misunderstood as I couldn't believe that this is a widely held belief. An accent is fine, I love accents. The biggest thing I lament regarding Polish is that Poles of my generation, from Poland, (and not Lithuania / Belarus etc.) have no discernable accents.

(Zanim jakiś Polak powie coś w stylu: "Są trzy sposoby mówienia na zewnątrz, które różnią się w zależności od pochodzenia geograficznego", to proszę być poinformowanym, że jestem bardzo tego świadom. Jestem zszokowany przez fakt, że 20-latek z Gdańska wymawia wszystkie słowa niemal identycznie jak 20-latek z Rzeszowa. To przykre. Przed wojnami i migracją wewnętrzną było wiele gwar. A obecnie jest chyba tylko kaszubski i śląski. :( )
( - Zapomniałem wspomnieć o Białymstoku i Katowicach! Wiele osób z Katowic, nawet dwudziestolatków, którzy nie potrafią mówić po śląsku, mówi inaczej. To prawie tak, jakby wysokość dźwięku podnosiła się na końcu każdego zdania.)


I had one professor tell us that "latinx" students who learn to speak English with no accent are suffering from internalized oppression. So I guess one would say my professors are what some might call left, (ie. a professor does anti-racist training at corporations... yet, ironically she's my favorite... as in we zoom one on one to discuss things we respectfully disagree about outside of class - and that says more about one's character than anything that they believe.) Left? Right? WHO CARES.

I noticed that these speakers, such as Trevor Noah use language masterfully when speaking if his aim is to "transmit" his thoughts to me. He uses "smart" words when they're of use, and code switches when that is of use. He speaks about it a lot in one interview. Jordan Peterson also does something similar. He switches between simple, at times idiomatic and "uncouth" language and very precise academic, professor-like words to communicate a vague concept very precisely.

I am looking at the way they speak, the way they can transmit an uncommon idea in a way that everyone can understand. Jordan Peterson did at times seem like he was struggling to find the right words, I guess that's probably necessary in order to try to use language to clearly communicate something that seems ineffable in a way that millions understand in seemingly the same way.

I would love to hone this ability, I took English for granted. I never forgot the language, I just wasn't as used to using English in a way that my peers would understand best. I used a lot of idioms and dialectal expressions, New York English, and then lots of Irish and African American English. I wonder if I would ever be able to replicate this level of pragmatic competence in a foreign language. I am trying to start by writing in English more. I reread some papers I wrote, and nearly half the sentences could have been worded better. I speak much differently than I write. When I read my posts here, I either sound like a 6th grader or an ESL student from the 1850s.

Writing requires the use of nothing but words. You cannot use body language to compensate for your failure to come up with a better way of using the language to explain things.

Many expressions are highly contextual, we can see this play out in everyday life. Nearly every one of us has at least one story about how texting led to a very big misunderstanding.

The cultural competence required to be a great communicator is "a whole other can of beans." How one can go about developing the linguistic competence required in order to effortlessly communicate even the most ineffable of ideas with great precision across multiple registers is worth considering. It seems that I've known this implicitly for a long time, but it was never something that I actively thought about. I don't like writing because I feel as if I am not as capable of expressing myself as when I speak. I also know that there is a risk involved when attempting to explore a topic that may or may not be politicized as then your language must be extra accurate. I think I will start to focus more on writing itself, as despite reading quite a lot I never pay attention to the way things are written the way I pay attention to a language I'm learning.

I guess this whole post was just me realizing that mastering one variant, register, dialect, etc. of a language is not sufficient if one wishes to be able to confidently communicate. What about Spanish? There are so many variants :shock: I guess I'll have to pick one if I wish to be as good of a communicator when in Spanish-speaking environments as I am in English-speaking environments. It's not really anything important, but I was thinking about this. I took English for granted and I realized that when I came back to the US. Now I want to work on Spanish also, so I guess the answer is just to keep reading, writing, speaking, listening, and asking questions, ( and also thanking those who are kind enough to correct you for free!)

- OMG, I wrote a book here :D .
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