Flights

I booked them. Goodbye to the United States on September 10. Eek. At least this way my mom will get to say goodbye to me. That is, if the floodwaters ever recede enough to get to the airport. I bought a sweet "I Survived the Great Missouri Flood" shirt at the CWS game on Friday. It might be a little preemptive, but I'm hoping it's going to be true!

I'll be back in the wonderful USofA somewhere in the last week of June. I'm pushing for July 1, so I'm home for Fourth of July 2012, but I'll have time to travel around Europe or get packed up after school ends.

I've been trying to get lesson plans in order in case I do show up and they want me to just teach a class. Hopefully I'll be student teaching, but I think I could manage to be a cool professor if needed. So, I wait. And prepare.

If I get a class on American culture, those kids won't know what hit them.

Rosetta Stone

My brother gave my Rosetta Stone as part of my graduation gift. The other part was a set of very sharp knives that amused my father and I since they were packed in the box with his Father's Day card. So, I started playing around with the Polish Rosetta Stone finally (since I finally have a computer with a working CD/DVD drive... booyeah).

It's fun (or bomba).

I worked though a couple lessons last night. They're going really quickly since they aren't introducing me to much that I haven't already studied. I imagine I'd be incredibly frustrated if I didn't already know that Poland changes the endings to its words for nearly every occasion. Luckily, I have a basic understanding of that. There are some things I fail to understand, though.

For example, I learned the word for "to swim" (pływać). However, the pictures show two different things when talking about groups of people.
When they're swimming in the same direction: Oni płyną.
When they're swimming in different directions: Oni pływają.

Evidently this is a very Polish thing to do - having two verbs for whether an action is being performed in the same direction or different directions.

The same thing happens with walking, except the difference between:
Oni chodzą (different directions).
Oni idą (same direction/together).

I haven't encountered this before. So I've no idea why the endings of the words change based on whether the activity is performed by multiple people together (think: flashmob at the mall) or multiple people separately (think: people shopping at a mall).

Other than that, the activities are pretty fun, once you figure out what they want from you. I'm not sure it's worth the close to $600 retail for Levels 1,2, and 3. But sales seem to always be around 250 or so. I'm pretty sure my brother got a good deal that was far far far far far less than that. It's a pretty nice alternative to LiveMocha, since it was written more specifically for English speakers learning Polish. LiveMocha is more a translation of lessons for learning English into Polish. So, it doesn't focus on the grammar in the same way. The problem so far is that there isn't enough output required from me. LiveMocha encourages me to write whole paragraphs by myself, but I've only had to type two sentences into Rosetta Stone so far. I think using them together will be the best way to further my learning.

Polish Legends - Dragon of Wawel/Lublin's Devil Claw

Last Sunday at Polish class, I agreed to give a presentation about a topic related to Poland. I'd heard a few presentations. Someone did one on coins. Someone did one on poppy seeds. Someone did one on the origin of Polish surnames. So, naturally, I had to come up with something fun that hadn't been done yet. So, I typed up two Polish Legends as I remembered them from my tours. Although, I did get some help in the story of the Devil's Paw from the website link you'll find there.

For my presentation, I decided to share two Polish legends. The first one is fairly well known: the tale of the dragon of Wawel.

At the bottom of Wawel hill in Krakow, there lived a terrible, fire-breathing dragon who ate the sheep and cattle of the surrounding farms. Many brave knights tried to kill the monster, but the dragon would breathe fire on them before they could get close.

The king invited knights and noblemen to slay the dragon, promising his daughter’s hand in marriage to the man who could destroy the destructive dragon. The man who married the princess would become king when the king died. Desiring the kingship, many men came, and many men failed to kill the dragon. The people of the countryside became more and more afraid to leave their homes.

One day, a young shoemaker’s apprentice named Krak asked the king if he could try to slay the dragon. The king reluctantly agreed, noting that Krak would surely die as he had no armor, no horse, and no sword.

Krak did, however, have a quick intellect. He bought a dead sheep and some sulphur. He cut the sheep open, stuffed it with powdered sulphur, and sewed the sheep up with the shoemaker’s thread. Krak approached the dragon’s cave with his sheep. He placed it near the entrance and hid behind a big rock.

The Dragon's Cave

After waking up from a long nap, the dragon came out of his cave to discover a midmorning snack in the form of Krak’s sheep. When the dragon ate the sheep, the sulphur caught fire, like a match, and the dragon felt his stomach burning. He ran to the river to quench the fire, but he could not stop it. He drank so much water that he began to swell up like a balloon.

Krak, coming from behind the rock, threw stones at the dragon. When the dragon turned to blow fire on Krak, all that came out of his mouth was steam because of all the water he’d drank. The dragon huffed and puffed, trying to blow fire on Krak, but he was so swollen that he exploded suddenly!

Krak and the princess married. Krak built the castle on top of Wawel Hill, and the people named the surrounding city Krakow after the king.

Some legends of the story have Krak filling the sheep with salt from the nearby Wieliczka salt mines. The dragon drinks so much water in his thirst that he explodes.

The second legend is less well known: The story of The Devil’s Paw in Lublin.

Once upon a time there was a poor widow. She lived on the little land she’d inherited from her late husband. A wealthy nobleman from a neighboring town raided the widow’s property, robbed what he could, and burned the rest. The nobleman knew that no male family members were alive to defend her. The widow went to court and demanded compensation, but she lost.

Appealing the verdict, she appealed to the tribunal court. The nobleman, being very wealthy, easily won at the tribunal court. The widow, exacerbated, exclaimed “Even the devils would have pronounced a fairer verdict!”

That night, at midnight, black fiery horses brought magnificent carriages to the Crown Tribunal building. The horses stamped the ground and snorted impatiently. Elegant gentleman stepped out of the carriages and entered the tribunal to examine the widow’s case again. These mysterious gentlemen called on a court writer. The court writer noted that under the long black robes, hooves could be seen. Under the ornate feathered hats of the mysterious gentlemen, horns peeked out.

Before the court writer could say anything, the mysterious men declared a new verdict. The nobleman would return the items he stole to the widow, and he would pay for the damage he caused. To emphasize the new verdict, the lead horned, hoofed mysterious man slammed his hand on the table, leaving a scorch mark on its surface. Some say that it was his way of signing the verdict, and he burned through the parchment.

The story continues that after the devil’s fair verdict, Jesus on the cross averted his face in shame from the scene and shed tears of blood. The devil’s party vanished. The next morning, the unfair judges fell down the stairs of the tribunal and broke their legs.

The scorched desk resides in the Lublin castle museum.

Lublin Castle Museum

Do You Know Polska?

This wonderful new internet resource comes from my awesome Polish facebook friends who are also interested in exchange of language. Check out: Do You Know Polska?

The first thing I do is turn off the jazz background music. But after the semi-cute introduction, you're able to choose whether or not you Know Polska. After choosing "no," the website takes you to different phrases and words (often slang) in Polish. It includes a definition, a pronunciation guide, an example of usage, and a very pretty photo of something related to Poland.

The first word I got was "bomba". "A way to say that something is cool and to express excitement and delight about something. The word literally means 'bomb' as if to say something is as exciting as a bomb explosion. Swell, awesome."

If you know Polish pretty well, you have the ability to add a photo or add a phrase - kind of like Urban Dictionary for Poles. Clicking on "Prove It" takes you to a timed quiz of Polish phrases. The website is fun and interactive. The content, unfortunately, is in its infancy, but it stands to be bomba as it grows up.

Robić v. Pracować in "to Work"

Graduation came and went along with the insanity that was graduation. Returning home, I just missed the Polish language class at the Polish Home. So, I waited for the next week. But the next week  was Memorial Day. Two weeks later, I went to my first Polish language lesson at the Polish home. Which means that two weeks after returning from school, I actually buckled down and started trying to remember Polish two weeks after returning from school. (I'm shocked to realize I've only been home for three weeks. It seemed like much longer.)


I crammed Polish language lessons from Lublin, trying to remember vocabulary primarily. I wanted to remember basic conjugations, and I figured grammar could come second. Grammar is super important in Polish, but I think the important thing for me is being understood. Being understood was the problem with the little old ladies in my Polish class. They were adorable, but they had the worst accents. The teacher told me that they spent two whole days going over pronunciation. So, it was hardly a problem coming into the class seven classes in.


We performed fake conversations as practice, and it was quite an interesting example of the difference in everyone's language abilities and personalities. The real Polish language interesting event was when we started talking about working in a garden.


pracować w ogród (ogrodzie)


One of the ladies asked why we weren't using robić. This question confused me because robić is "to do," "to make," and "to work." In my head, pracować made much more sense for "to work in the garden" because in the garden, one does physical labor. Pracować appeared, to me, to be a question of labor in which one is A. getting paid or B. physically laboring. After all, you robić shopping (zakupy)! That's definitely not pracować.