Polish Online

Are you serious, world? I've been living in Poland for four weeks, struggling my way through language classes because I couldn't find ways to learn Polish at home. Low-and-behold, there's this AMAZING Polish language resource online at UPitt's website. My roommate told me that I should go to the Pitt website (evidently their Polish-English dictionary is the best on the web).

While looking for books on Amazon (about the Polish language, of course), I came across a review for a book that said (basically), "Why buy this book? The up-to-date version is online. Along with a computer program you can use to do drills that will correct you."

It will be frustrating to do by myself, but at least I have another resource so I won't lose everything I'm learning here.

Post Offices and Postcards: On repeat experiences

I just did the math, and I've spent approximately 60 USD on buying and spending postcards since I've been in Poland. Sending a postcard to the US cost 3.2z. Sending one to England costs 3z. This most recent trip to the post office resulted in 28 mailed postcards. Meaning, if you don't get a postcard, I either don't care about you or it was lost in the mail. Whichever you'd prefer.

Anyway, before going, I wrote out my post office vocabulary for easy reference as I tend to freeze in real life situations. I'm not sure if it was that or the fact that it was a repeated experience (since the last time I was mailing postcards) that made it so successful.

I asked for 28 stamps, with my postcards in front of me.
She saw that they were postcards and asked if they were international.
I said yes.
She asked if they were going to Europe.
This is where I froze. I should've said. Nie. Dwiescie siedem USA. Jeden ... England (Angliki? Angleterre? Angsomethingortheother). Instead I froze. She grabbed my postcards and started going through them. Except I hadn't written "USA" on two. And two others still haven't been addressed. Another reason I should've spoken up at this point!
Alas, she finally gave me back the postcards (Priority, of course) and the required stamps (How come it's 20g more for across the Atlantic? International is international...)
Then, when she said the amount it costs... I understood her. And paid.
And it was awesome.

So, maybe it was the ability to look down at my cheat sheet when she said "international" and know what she was asking. Or maybe it was just knowing the process. (Perhaps this is why I progressively got better at ordering my large piwo w sokiem and my apple juice and vodka: repetition!)

Polish Mass and Music

One of the mainstays of my time in Poland is karaoke. As such, I'd love to learn some Polish music, but I have no idea what is popular, how to find lyrics, and how to translate them. Luckily, there's at least one site that has a few songs up. They aren't all currently popular (and they aren't all to my taste), but this site has a rough translation from Polish to English along with a short English biography of the singer and a youtube video of the song.

Maybe I'll learn this one for next week's karaoke.

Anyway, today I figured I'd better brave Mass, even though I still haven't memorized the Ojcze Nasz. It was fine, except I was largely confused. I'm having a real hard time finding parts of the Mass online in a Polish-English translation. Also, not everyone went to communion! My mother said that she believed that the Polish people take confession much more seriously than we do at home. So perhaps I was sitting in between the sinners...

It frustrated me a bit because I felt like I missed the important part of the Mass. However, the odd bumps that appeared on my hand while in Warsaw diminished while I was at Mass. Perhaps God was recognizing my attempt!

Journal Four: The Weekend after Krakow and Hitting the Proverbial Language Wall

Krakow was amazing and gorgeous. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to go this past weekend. Even though the heatwave is killing me.

Perhaps it was a combination of exhaustion and frustration with other people, but the beginning of this week, I hit my wall. I feel like I'm not learning enough. I'm frustrated by that. I'm tired. I'm not even wanting to go out and explore the city. I really need to push past this feeling. We were finally assigned real homework for the first time - talking about how family and their professions. I was happy about the opportunity to try out forming sentences by myself instead of the fill-in-the-blank sentence formation we do in our workbook. When it came down to time, though, I was just completely lost. We never learned the phrase for "stay-at-home-Dad" or "actuary."

I need to reorganize and define my language goals and find a way to meet them. I'm feeling like I have so much to do - being in class from 8 am to 8 pm with only a small gap in between for exploring the city, catching up on stuff for university at home, and doing homework. Then there are the optional events at night. Things just really add up. I've even stopped going out as much at night. I'm in a real language funk, and I can't figure out how exactly to get out of it.

Journal Three: Exploring Poland and the Language

This past weekend, we went to Kazimierz Dolny, a nearby artsy colony. Our weekends are so full with the fieldtrips of various kinds. We also had a walking tour of Lublin. The program doesn't leave you with much time to explore your own Polish skills.

I don't know exactly what I expected as far as language acquisition. From classes, I'm learning the "My name is..." "I'm from..." side of the language. However, I need to go out and learn more of the day-to-day interactions. Instead, I focus on the magic word of Polish "prosze" for my daily needs.

I've been good about getting lody, groceries, or stamps by myself. It's easy to cling to the people in the program with better Polish skills than I have - to make them come out with me. It's also easy to only converse in English - but if they were to converse in Polish, I would be completely lost... So I'm not sure what to make of that.

Language classes are getting harder. Especially as we're trying new cases. No longer are we just saying nominative, but we're adding in the instrumental. I'm frustrated at the limited quality of my language ability. Especially the lack of past tense...

Journal Two: End of the First Week

I'm still going strong with the "having fun times in Poland" and enjoying the cultural differences. I'm trying to go out and be independent. However, some of the things I'm doing are a bit harder. It's a bit difficult, and I run into language problems.

I had a failure today. I went out alone after lunch. I went to a couple bookstores, but I didn't know for sure what the books said. I think I want to pick up a children's book on Polish legends and fairytales. I then went to the tourism center. Which didn't have many brochures. You had to talk to the people for info, and I didn't really need anything. So, I bought my postcards quietly. Which was good because I broke a 50 and got more change. They're big on change here. The postcards were maybe 50-80gz, which is like 15-30 cents.

Anyway, I then found this open air market. I saw a stall that had perfumes that were name brand, and I thought maybe they'd have very cheap Yves Saint Laurent Opium. She asked me some question, and I said, "Nie Rozumiem" which translates to "I don't understand." So she repeated the question! But it didn't help, because I didn't mean that I didn't understand her question!

So, after that failure, I scampered away with my language tail between my legs. So, I braved an ice cream stand next. Where the exchange went as well as possible:

(In Polish)
Hello.
Hello.
I don't speak Polish.
Oh! Good.
Which type would you like?
Strawberry.
Ah. Strawberry.
How many scoops? One, two?
One.
That will be 2z. Thank you.
Thank you.

So, I think she said at some point that I was doing OK for not speaking Polish.

So, it was a success. I feel pretty good about that exchange.

Journal One: Arrival in Poland

My experience with culture shock began right away with a complete inability to contact "the outside world" since my departure on Saturday...

Today, I received a temporary password which will only allow me on the computers in the basement of the dorm (which you can only get into with a key you have to ask for at the front desk) and in the university (which are propped up to about the height of my belly button. Two of them are near ledges low enough to sit on and of course those are the most commonly used). I would've had a real password yesterday except for the fact that they miss-entered some of my information for the IT guys, resulting in no internet for me. No one in the dorm has quite figured out the connection, but I hear they'll give you the cords. I would've received one by now, but they give you one when you turn in your paper that has personal information about your computer (ipconfig sort of stuff). I cannot get this personal information about my computer because the fuses in our room blew. (At first I thought my computer cord had broken, until I tried my ipod in the kitchen and it began charging, but I didn't have time to fully charge it, so it's not even of entertainment use). I went to the fuse box, and it was locked.

The people in the entryway of my building don't speak English, so I have to ask for my room key in Polish. The rooms are very small. The pillows are 3x a normal pillow size. It takes about 20 minutes to get from the dorm to class.

Arriving in Warsaw, I heard a Rod Stewart cover on the plane, which made me miss my former roommate, a big Rod Stewart fan, and by proxy, America. The airport was fine, and the passport control didn't even ask me any questions!

The computers at the university. keeps correcting my spelling. It thinks I should type in a British manner.

Also, on the first day of class, the pronunciation chart they gave us for Polish used British pronunciation, so it was awful. There was a handout, thank goodness with American pronunciation.

Two women from Bolivia are in my class. I'm drawing on my 7th and 8th grade Spanish to communicate, but it's rough since I mostly just remember the Padre Nuestro.

The Europeans largely all speak French and English, so communication isn't impossible.

The dorm has no a/c and no screens on the window, so I opened up wide and just hoped the mosquitoes don't bite.

I must still be in the "I LOVE IT HERE" phase. Classes are awesome, but I wish there were more. I love it. I have class from 9-12:15. There's a lecture from 12:30-1:30 in English. Then there's lunch. Between lunch and 5 I'm free. Then I have a conversation class at 5, which is helpful for the hard words and a review session from the earlier class. Dinner's at 6:30. On Wednesdays they take us out to a Polish restaurant or show us how to make Polish food. Then we eat. Every other Monday is a Polish sing-a-long, starting two Mondays from now. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings they review the Polish news. They arrange field trips of museums around here and Polish movie nights.

The weather is good. It's been hot - maybe in the 80s. It rained the first night here and a bit yesterday, but when I was inside. Today it's nice and cool. It gets bright here at like 4 am, though. Very annoying for my sleep pattern.

Airline Drama

Vayama.com (specialty: cheap, international, multi-leg airplane reservations. NOT their specialty: customer service) has an etiquette section of their website based on what is and isn't acceptable in different cultures. It's not as complete as the Canadian one I mentioned in a past post, but their section on Poland does hit the major questions.

I've only heard good things about Vayama. Which is why I surprised by my customer service disaster. I went online to check-in for my flight to LA. While I was online, I thought that I might as well verify my flight to Poland and see if I could get better seats. Alas, I wasn't able to access my reservation because there'd been a change to it. Who knows when this change happened because Vayama never notified me about it. So, I called customer service three times, leaving a message each time. When they finally called me back, it was a woman with a very heavy accent telling me that I needed to reconfirm my flights because two of the flight numbers had changed. So I reconfirmed, and she sent me a confirmation e-mail.

On the confirmation e-mail, I discovered that not only had those two flight numbers changed, but another flight number had changed, a flight time had changed (which is slightly more important), and my e-ticket number on LOT had changed - probably the most significant change, in my opinion. So, I went onto LOT airlines to see if I could finally confirm my seats. The same LOT website I couldn't access with my old e-ticket number, which was making me think for quite a few scary hours that they'd just canceled my flights and not notified me. On the LOT website, I found out that the seats I had selected when booking my flight were lost since I hadn't reconfirmed the changes to my itinerary in time - the changes that no one notified me about. So, I picked a (new and) terrible (aisle) seat, hoping that the people near the window - the best place for a nine hour sleeping flight - weren't going to want to get in and out all the time.

That, wasn't what I considered terrible customer service until I returned from California and went to check my twitter. During this process, I had tweeted my frustrations:

Evidently @vayama changed my reservation. Didn't e-mail or notify me in any way about it. Now @vayama isn't answering my calls.

At least I went on-line to see if I could change my seats today and found out even if @vayama didn't want to notify me itself.

I had to reconfirm my flights because the flight number changed. Seems a bit excessive. I'm sure @vayama has a reason? Glad it's fixed.

Oh, And they only told me about the changes to two of my flights... not to the third...

But what was worse than my tweets were the response from their "customer service."

VayamaVoice: @omahairish the AIRLINE changed your flight not vayama. Glad it's fixed now.

VayamaVoice: @omahairish you can always view the CURRENT status of your itinerary by going to www.vayama.com/mytrip

Seriously, Vayama? I KNOW who changed my flight. The issue is that I was never notified by the people who should have notified me. Also, even now, I can't view the CURRENT status of my itinerary because of this. I replied to him. I know I should just drop it, but I've never heard of customer service types being that incredibly rude.

What's sketchy about this customer service twitter feed is that it's separate from their official twitter. I thought their official twitter was @vayama. This is @vayamavoice. He's only been operating since May 6, but hardly has any tweets. Also, he only has three followers. All of this points to : NOT REAL. Sorry if I'm not going to send you the info you need to get into my account.

All this points to, I'll avoid using Vayama again. Which is too bad, because they're super cheap and useful as far as websites go.

Oh, and you should check out their Polish Etiquette page.

Grammar and Keyboards

I'm never going to learn Polish! Also, the Polish language keyboard I downloaded for my laptop is super confusing. I'm beginning to learn where everything is, but it's hard to remember to switch my y's and z's when typing.

Anyway, today's frustration results from finally completing a written exercise in Polish on LiveMocha.

The parts in orange are the corrections! And, the reviewer forgot to change "Jesteś gruba" to "Jesteś gruby" because technically it's the same "you" as in "Jesteś bogaty!" I'm terrible with subject/verb agreements. It's my downfall after six years of French, too.

Ten chłopiec jest niski. On jest młody. Ta kobieta jest stara. Ona jest niska. Ten mężczyzna jest wysoki. On jest gruby. Jestem biedny. Jestem wysoki. Jesteś bogaty. Jesteś gruba. Dziewczyna jest niska. Dziewczyna jest młoda. On jest (he's) wysoki, gruby, niski, ładny Ona jest (she's) wysoka, gruba, niska, ładna

Check out the confusing the Polish international keyboard for QWERTY US keyboards (compliments of Microsoft).

A day with fast internet

I drove into town (a phrase that makes my friends laugh at me because I'm only 15 minutes away from the city, but it seems like I live hours from civilization from how I talk) in order to visit an internet cafe. I had no real purpose - thinking I might delve more into grad schools. Upon arriving at the coffee shop with its glorious wifi I remembered I still needed to download the pdf accompaniment for the Mission Europe podcasts I was raving about earlier.

Good thing I downloaded them. They're officially the coolest things ever. If I was teaching a Polish language class, I would use these for sure. They're so much fun with pictures and color and the words in Polish (but with a bilingual dictionary in the back) and little grammar break out boxes! I'm completely obsessed with it and will most likely be spending my entire evening playing with them.

Which is actually a problem, given the fact that I also received an e-mail asking me where my final report for my grant to Dublin is... despite the fact that I e-mailed her a month ago asking her if she received it. Which means, I need to spiff it up and resend it.

One of my language partners on LiveMocha suggested his website to me. It's very busy and unorganized, which are downsides. However, the website does have some cool features. On the dictionary page (I'll have to do another post on a good Polish-English dictionary online. I've had some real problems when trying do to do translations.) there is the sweetest text-to-speech tool. It looks like it's embedded, and I'm not sure who to give real credit to for this awesome feature. I know tools such as this are out there for French, but because I always found French so easy to pronounce, I never explored them. This Polish one is so useful! Granted, with these online things you get out of it what you put in. So proper spelling and use of the correct accent marks is essential!

The lessons page of his website is a joke. It looks like someone just pulled in random videos from YouTube about Polish. The grammar section is equally unhelpful. It just has a pdf of a book someone wrote about Polish grammar. I've seen the same information in more pleasing formats elsewhere online. But, for that sort of thing, I prefer hard copy text. There are some flashcards that aren't terrible, but, yet again, I'd prefer to go to the original site than suffer through the original interface. It's a great compilation of materials, but there's too much going on and the format is hard to focus on, unfortunately.

Fashion in Europe

It's probably a sign of my youth that I'm this fashion conscious about going to a foreign country. I don't want to stick out as an American, especially as Americans are evidently hated by the rest of the world. Or at the very least, we're considered rude and loud. If you heard my mother's family all together during Christmas, you'd believe the loud bit at least. I'm sure some of the rudeness is just a cultural difference. I was always of the "when in Rome" way of traveling. Recently, I've changed my mind a bit. It's so hard to find what people find socially acceptable. Forums and websites offer conflicting views - probably because of regional and generational differences. Taking this into mind, it seems a lot more reasonable that people will make gaffes that are considered rude.

Back to fashion, though. Rumor has it no one wears flip-flops - my summer shoe of choice - in Europe. I began flipping through fashion blogs to see if there's a general "style" that's big in Poland. When I was last in Dublin I noticed that women rarely wore jeans or pants. Tights and dresses were the thing. Heels or at the very least boots were required. Hairstyles tended to be wavy and look almost unbrushed, and heavy make-up was only popular among a certain "punk" group of teenagers.

My pre-departure "how to learn a foreign language" class (required) warned about dressing in a manner that fit the culture. Especially for women wanting to avoid unnecessary catcalls or attention of any kind, dressing more modestly than normal might be required. In America, mini skirts are now the size of belts, and if a skirt is an inch or two below your butt, it's considered acceptable. Understandably, I'm worried about what will be considered acceptable elsewhere.

At least the weather will stay cool - the 60s and 70s - and rainy, encouraging some of my cuter outfits. My mom keeps telling me that when she was in Poland (when she was 18, as the stirrings of Solidarity were beginning) blue jeans were very high fashion. Evidently they smuggled jeans in and sold them on the black market. Which sounds very exciting, but a little bit like it could not be true anymore.

For now, I'll just shop for appropriate summer footwear and pack just enough outfits to get by.

T-minus Three Weeks to Takeoff

The problem when most people ask me why I'm learning Polish is that I don't have one, singular GREAT reason for it. I generally go with the vague answer that it's for professional development. Some graduate schools require knowledge of two languages other than English for their Ph.D. programs. I know French well enough to get by there, so that leaves me looking for a second language. Polish does not serve any real purpose there either. While I am interested in the movement of Polish communities in America, I am fairly certain my dissertation will be on the historical and literary changes in the way Americans define and treat mental illness. Therefore, I'm stuck without a good answer.

The "real" reasons are as follows:

• In reality, my childhood heroes have mostly been Polish (with the exception of one Miss Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran): Marie Curie, Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałesa, etc.
• The poetry of Wisława Szymborska is some of the most beautiful work I've ever read.
• My mother once told me, in a fit of international pride, that we were descended from Nicholas Copernicus.
• My Polish grandfather was incredibly proud of his heritage, and I think we would have gotten along well, despite my semi-lapsed Catholicism.
• The travel bug bit me. Hard. A trip to Poland, especially one funded by my generous university, is too much to pass up.

I'm not looking to reclaim a heritage. I'm proud of my mixed ancestry, and generally, when people ask where I come from, I'm more likely to say "Nebraska" than I am to rattle off the list of countries from which my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents immigrated.

The idea of traveling somewhere by myself when I don't speak the language spooked my type A into action. I combed blogs, discussion forums, and language resources for information about Poland. I'm almost an expert on Polish language resources (in English) on the web. Mixed with my experiences in Poland will be an evaluation of those resources in case some similarly driven person stumbles upon this blog one day.

I started with cultural information. It's supposed to be impossible to get around on trains if you don't know Polish because none of the signs are bilingual except for maybe in Krakow and Warsaw. There go my plans to visit the Sacred Heart school in Pobiedziska some weekend.

I found a great Canadian resource on what is appropriate in Polish culture. As I experience more of Poland, I'll have to make my own decision about whether or not their ideas of cultural customs are accurate. I am a little nervous about the cultural customs about drinking. I don't seem to have the stomach for vodka, and evidently the Polish expect you to pound it back as well as they do. Or, at the very least, you're to drink whenever a toast is made.

My two favorite for-beginners language services are Live Mocha and an amazing podcast called Mission Krakow (Misja Kraków).

Live Mocha offers Rosetta Stone-style language courses for free - or a low cost when one advances to higher levels of language learning. You will not learn any phrases incredibly useful for travelling in the first few lessons, but it has a drill-like system that mixes audio, picture representations, and visual displays of the word itself to help one really learn the material. The program keeps the material mixed up enough to keep it interesting. Live Mocha's peer-review set-up allows those with native language capabilities to help new learners, and it's easy to find someone eager to help a newbie learn. It helps give a feel for the set up and grammar of the language. With a language such as Polish, I knew I wanted the audio help that comes with a program such as Live Mocha because, at first at least, I would be struggling over pronunciation.

Downside: the format isn't easily accessible to those of us with slow internet, and the language lessons will take at least an hour to complete. Live Mocha is meant for those who are serious about their language study with the time to devote to it. When I was fitting in Polish research between term papers and club meetings, it was nearly impossible to complete a lesson. You can, however, go back at any time to where you left off in a lesson or to redo a lesson.

Mission Europe is a series of spy-adventure themed podcasts. They are perhaps the coolest things ever. It places an agent, in the case of Poland, Suzanna, in a foreign country with a mystery to solve. The Polish one consists of 26 episodes designed to help you learn Polish along with Suzanna. Each podcast is only about five minutes long, but you'll want to listen to it more than once. Suzanna can be quite annoying at times as she bumbles along, trying to figure out what people are saying. However, it teaches essential language from the beginning - Hello, I don't understand, Please, etc. On the website are accompanying pdfs so you can learn what the words actually look like. I wish I had started with this podcast instead of some of the others I've tried - ones that we'll explore later. I find the podcast method to be the most effective for someone with a busy lifestyle. I can listen to them while walking to and from class, in the car, or even at my computer while writing this post.