In Which I Begin Learning Polish.

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well it appears that working on the Monday afternoon/evening shift during Euro 2016 does have a silver lining after all being that I missed England's defeat by Iceland. Though as I understood things so did the English players.

Anyway the morning was spent doing a bit of the household chores,having a bath, getting ready for work but also for the first time spending half an hour going through the Get Started In Polish book I mentioned last week (which I forgot to mention is written by Joanna Michalak-Gray).

Earlier in the morning started to listen to Polish radio. Not expecting anything but curious. The station was PR1 Jedynka. What did I learn? Obviously vocabulary wise nothing other than "Brexit" though I think I caught "fascist" also. Conversation seemed to be at a slightly faster pace than normal ( except for the news when suddenly things seemed to go into hyper drive) but that's probably because I'm not yet used to hearing Polish spoken regularly.

After loud heavy metal music that I would have switched off in any language there was another discussion about Brexit. The only word I understood of course being Brexit.

Anyway to the half hour with the book. As it happened it was like the first day at school where certain rules are laid down and you're told where to go. Only in this case the author was saying what we should do to help us further.

The first suggestion was twenty-thirty minutes worth of lessons a day. For me for a whole gamut of reasons that's just impractical. My plan is to concentrate as much as I can two days a week then see how things are progressing.

Then I'm told I should listen to radio or television programmes. I got you there Joana. Radio has been blasting. TV? No such luck. Try as I may I haven't been able to watch anything in Polish as I've been blocked with words to say that they cannot show the content outside of Poland. A pity. Because as I think I've said before when I started learning Welsh watched programmes in that language intensely, particularly pre school and sports as I'd have some idea as to what was going on.

The other suggestion I want to mention is to follow blogs on people learning Polish. is to follow blogs about people doing this. I googled this only to discover that in the main it's linked to people flogging language lessons."Get your first lesson free!" or variations on this theme I noticed from those who for all I knew might have more in common with Warrington than Warsaw. All of them suggesting that Polish is the hardest language to learn and that I needed their help for a fee. For the moment not for me.

Many more suggestions. Most of them obvious then finally to some actual teaching and the biggest shock of all. The "audio" facility of this book is unavailable on my tablet,my kindle and even on my PC! For the moment I'm making do with what a word sounds like by going online. But it's not easy. What I've learnt is than pronouncing a Polish word as if it was in an English alphabet would cause even more laughter to a Pole than last night's England result.

The first word I've learnt? Przepraszam (Pronounced "Psheprashaam")which is Polish for excuse me.

Whilst I had lunch before going to work I watched the second episode of the Polish TV series The Border (with English subtitle)s. Think I've just noticed the Polish for the F word and the C word. I don't expect to be that fluent. At least not for the moment.

Until the next time.