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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After a few years of living a fairly sedentary lifestyle, last winter I added ‘go for a daily walk or cycle’ to my habit tracker. I go swimming and visit the gym fairly regularly, at least a couple of times a week, but as I work from home there were sometimes days, or even strings of days, where I didn’t leave the flat other than to walk the 500m round trip to the local supermarket.
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I am three weeks in to my latest attempt at teaching myself Polish. I first tried to learn Polish ten years ago while studying for my PhD. My research was based out in northern Poland in and around the city of Gdańsk, and so I put myself on a sort of crash course to learn the very basics so that I could get about the city, order a cup of tea, buy a ticket on the metro, that sort of thing. I worked with translators from the University of Gdańsk for my interviews, but I had to manually translate documents and newspaper articles myself which meant that the progress I made was in a very small, technical area of the language. I knew the words for ‘nuclear power’, ‘electricity’, ‘local government’, ‘international’, ‘solidarity’, but I couldn’t hold a simple conversation with the hostel owner’s six year old daughter.
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On Sunday afternoon I said a very emotional farewell to the digital piano I have had for twenty-three years. In my pyjamas with a cup of tea next to me I pulled my grandfather’s crumbling score for Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier down from the shelves above the piano and played goodbye to my Roland with Prelude in C Major. It’s such a simple piece, but it’s one of my favourites. When I had finished, I closed the lid for the final time and began to disassemble the piano ready for the family who were coming to collect it from me later the same day.
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