After being in a little funk this past week I decided 2 things:
1) I need to view language learning as a hobby that I pursue regardless of the outcome, meaning that even if I can never speak in a way that I'm satisfied with, it won't matter. This is easier said than done, but it's the goal, and I'll try to keep reminding myself of this when I start focusing too much on outcomes. This also means that I'm going to continue doing something in Polish (and also Italian) everyday, but I'm not going to aim for a certain amount of time. When I feel like I've done enough, I'll just stop for the day. This is what I've been doing with Italian (but not Polish) I think this will help transition me into considering Polish more as a hobby.
2) I will never be a proficient Italian/Polish/anything speaker, but I can make some small improvements. I need to focus more on these small improvements than getting overwhelmed by the impossibility of larger improvements.
So, I decided to focus on very simple and achievable goals like making 3 or 4 word sentences. (Wait, that sounds like the opposite of what I just said before about not having outcomes...maybe
tiny outcomes are ok?)
I listed a bunch of adjectives at the top of the page and just wrote super simple sentences, using GT (hopefully the sentences it gave me were correct!) I decided to take the sentence construction "I have a ______" and make a ton of sample sentences and look for patterns. I made some useful (to me) observations, mainly that having "a person" follows a different rule from having "an object" when the person/object is masculine. It seems like "dog" and "cat" are masculine words that follow the same pattern as people.
The pattern with the feminine words I already knew, and I also knew that masculine words don't change in this situation,
but I didn't realize there was a difference between masc. objects and people. So even though this was an exercise that mostly reinforced things I knew it did point out some things that had been very confusing to me. I also discovered a really funky thing that neutral nouns do when they don't end with a "o".
For example:
PERSON:
sąsiad = neighbor (masc)
przyjazny = friendly (masc form)
Mam przyjazn
ego sąsiad
a. I have a friendly neighbor.
matk
a = mother (fem)
bogat
a = rich (fem form)
Mam bogat
ą matk
ę. (I wish!)
OBJECT:
rower = bicycle (masc)
zielony = green (masc form)
Mam zielony rower. I have a green bicycle. NOTHING CHANGES.
kanap
a = couch (fem)
now
a = new (fem form)
Mam now
ą kanap
ęNEUTRAL WEIRDNESS:
lustr
o = mirror (neutral)
Mam duże lustr
o. NOTHING CHANGES
mieszkani
a = apartment (neutral, but ends in "a" just to make things confusing)
Mam duże mieszkani
e. I have a big apartment.
So next week I'm going to write up as many simple sentences with this construction. I'm going to try to remind myself to revisit this activity with some frequency, otherwise I will totally forget about it and get confused all over again.
2 Second Rant:So if everyone can totally understand the meaning of sentences where masculine and neutral words don't change endings,
why do the feminine ones need to change?
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