Back in December I decided that I wanted to make the time to learn Polish. I wrote a little bit about why I want to learn Polish and how I planned to go about doing so in this blog post. Four months in, I thought I’d share a little update on my progress so far.
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It’s been a quiet week for February half term. Ed and I often go hiking in Wales during his school holidays but due to the storms and flooding across England and Wales that wasn’t possible this year. Instead, Ed’s spent the hours between his morning and evening runs playing futoshiki and listening to cycling or football podcasts.
I’ve felt really uninspired with photography recently. I think it’s because it’s the end of winter and the weather (and light) has been terrible for weeks on end. I can’t wait for spring to come so that we can spend more time outdoors together.
I’ve been teaching myself to play Chopin’s Nocturne No.20 in C# Minor for the past few weeks and I’ve just about mastered the first section which corresponds to the first page of the Schirmer edition of preludes, nocturnes and waltzes. I had piano lessons from the ages of 10 to 17, but I never really learnt how to practice properly. I always thought that music practice for both violin and piano involved playing through my pieces, studies and scales for an hour or so, start to finish. I rarely pulled my pieces apart bar by bar, didn’t really warm up before practising, and gave up each practice session as soon as I got frustrated. Learning how to practice piano – and violin – properly as an adult has been an interesting experience.
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As part of my efforts to teach myself Polish, I am currently focusing on vocabulary, and I thought it’d be fun to keep a list of my favourite words as I learn them. I love the sound of Polish, and the following words especially.
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I am quite new to YouTube. I prefer Vimeo as a platform as the video quality is better, and there are some features that Vimeo offers that I really like as a filmmaker. In order to get with the times though, I’ve tried to embrace YouTube. I know it’s where people go when they’re looking for videos online, and almost everyone has a Google account so it’s easy for viewers to interact with videos there too.
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