Dzień dobry! IntegrART 8 speaking! Now that we’re more than halfway through the project, we have come to touch on some milestones, the most recent one – we finished our Polish lessons!
We started this side quest of our IntegrART journey in December, and although we can’t say it’s always been easy, learning Polish has turned to be quite fun and useful.
In the beginning we couldn’t help but wonder what was the need to stretch as many consonants as possible into the same word haha and we struggled trying to get the right pronunciation with all the ś, ź, ć, dź, or, as we would call them, the Polish sounds. Listening to native Polish speakers felt like hearing a made up language or even as if they were speaking parsel (a language for snakes and other magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe 🐍).
But then, once we learned some basics, tiny bits of this seemingly undecipherable language started to feel a little more familiar. Whenever someone came into the office speaking Polish at our workplaces we could at least be able to introduce ourselves and excuse us with a “przepraszam, nie mówie po polsku” 😀
Then of course, one of the best ways to learn a language is working with children, since they already know some essential vocabulary quite well and are delighted to teach it to someone older than them. This was Aile’s experience working on art lessons with kids at Łokietek (colors and art supplies were some of the first finds!) and Miguel also had his share at the high school (they even had a ‘teach Polish to Miguel’ day haha). We got to experience it as well during the winter camps, where most of the children were quite open to communication and helped us find a way to make it work, whether using a translator or eventually giving us some quick Polish masterclasses haha.
Then we got into some more technical stuff with the grammatical cases and some issues arose – these people decline everything! However, it was also fun getting to notice this, especially when it comes to people’s names because sometimes they sound so weird and funny if declined.
After all this odyssey, we got to the final lessons where we had a little test to gather up everything we had learned. I must say we were a little scared but it turned out alright! We all passed and with very good marks, so now we can proudly say that we have an A1.2 level (non slavic) 😎
Last but not least, we would like to thank the school and especially our teacher Berta for her help, patience and sense of humor. Every time some misunderstanding or language gag came up with the parallel between Polish and any of our own languages was such a highlight!
Anyway, let’s see where our Polish learning brings us!
