My family is Polish.

When I was a child, I would always hear my mom and grandmother speak Polish together, but since their husbands were both monolingual English speakers, they mostly spoke English when their husbands were around so that nobody would feel excluded.

The way they tell it, I was bilingual as a small child, but since English was the dominant language at home, my vocabulary never really expanded beyond that of a toddler’s. The fact that I never really learned how to speak Polish has always felt like something of a family shame.

In fact, it’s not unusual for the children of immigrants to lose their heritage language, unless tremendous efforts are made to preserve it and pass it on. My experience is pretty similar to that of Marissa Blaszko of Relearn A Language, who grew up speaking Polish but who lost her native language when she started attending her English-only public school. (If anyone else is in the situation of wanting to relearn their heritage language, I highly recommend her website and her YouTube channel @Relearnalanguage!)

“I had no idea that the language could be so easily lost,” my mom said. “For some reason, I thought it was just going to be transferred to you in utero. I thought that because I spoke Polish, you would also speak Polish.”

It’s hard to explain how deeply I yearned to speak Polish. The sound of the language is like poetry to my ears. It is the sound of love, of my mother, of laughter, of warm food, of soft hugs and kisses, and of being cared for. For me, the language of love is Polish.

I would have dreams in Polish where I could fluently speak and understand the language. And then when I would wake up and feel so disappointed, because the language-barrier was back. Not being able to speak Polish felt like there was a wall cutting me off from a whole section of myself. Not having access to this beautiful romantic, cherished language was like not having access to a piece of my own soul.

Multiple times throughout my childhood, I would try to learn Polish. But we didn’t live in a place with a large enough Polish community to offer external support. There were no Polish Saturday schools in our area. Polish is such a minority language that it was really hard to acquire study materials. Polish was not one of the foreign languages taught at my high school. (Or at my college, or at my graduate school.)

So we’d start at square-one—over and over again. Just naming things around the house. Bread; chleb. Tea; herbate. Food; jedzenie.

We never got very far.

The amount of times I would need vocabulary repeated far outstripped everybody’s patience. We didn’t know it then, but what I needed was a spaced repetition system (SRS). Spaced repetition is a learning technique where you basically get reminded of something at ever-increasing intervals until it moves into long-term memory. But we didn’t have these tools then. It was just me and my mom and my grandma, walking around the house naming things. Within a few days, all efforts would be abandoned. I would feel stupid, and everyone would feel frustrated.

When I was in college, I decided to study abroad to learn more about my Polish roots. Unfortunately, my school didn’t have a direct relationship with any universities in Poland. The closest I could get was Charles University in Prague—which is in the Czech Republic. (Not Poland, but at least on the same continent!)

Before my semester began, I spent a month traveling in Poland. My grandmother had a couple of contacts in Warsaw and Krakow, and these two women were my hosts. They took me all over: Warsaw, Malbork castle, Gdansk, Krakow, the Wieliczka salt mines, Zakopane, and the Tatra Mountains.

Getting to visit Poland for a month was an incredibly meaningful experience to me. It touched a deep place in my heart to hear the language surrounding me, spoken everywhere. And I even started to pick it up, because the sounds and grammar were so familiar to me from when I was a baby.

And it was exciting to me to see modern Poland. It is sometimes said that people know more about Mars than about Poland. Poland is a medium-sized country of 41 million people. It has a larger population than Greece, Canada, Taiwan, Sweden, and Australia—and yet few Americans could find it on a map. The Western perception of Poland is frozen time with black-and-white photos of World War II rubble and communist block housing.

But then my semester started. I had to go to Prague—which was a wonderful experience, but it didn’t bring me any closer to learning Polish. When I returned to America a few months later, I was glad to be reunited with my family, but I also felt tremendously sad at leaving Europe. I felt like my time there was not yet finished.

When I was a graduate student earning my MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State, I made another attempt to learn Polish. And this time I got further than ever before. I studied the Pimsleur audio recordings, which used an audio-only spaced repetition system. That year, I was finally able to have rudimentary conversations in Polish with my mother and grandmother.

This was a good start, but the Pimsleur language course only stopped after only 30 lessons, and then I was stuck again.

Occasionally, I would try to write letters and translate recipes, using Google Translate, but at the time (in the early 2010s) it was a terrible translator.

It would be another ten years before I studied Polish again.

So what changed?

Firstly, I underwent a series of traumatic health issues. You can read more about that here, but the upshot was that I became much more pro-active and intentional about my health and well-being. 

One of the things that was especially transformative for me was strength training. This was something I never thought I would do, and yet week after week I was constantly surprising myself by doing things I never thought my body could do. I saw amazing benefits applying consistent pressure over a long period of time. 

It was incredibly empowering. My body felt transformed, but I was also noticing inner benefits.

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

A. A. Milne

I was two years into my strength-training journey, when the thought occurred to me, If I can do this, what else can I do?

There is a saying that the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. The same can be said of language learning. So I dug in my heels and decided that this time, I was finally going to learn Polish and I wasn’t going to stop until I could speak it fluently.

My 40th birthday was a few years away, and this was a gift I wanted to give my future 40-year-old self.

(I also committed to finally following through with all my paperwork to confirm my Polish citizenship and get my Polish passport. My son and I both qualify for dual-citizenship, but the paperwork is a multi-step, multi-year process…and I’ll leave that for another blog post.)

It was around this time that I saw this Kurzgesagt video: “Changing Your Life—One Step at a Time.” There is a moment in the video that talks about becoming the person you want to be with daily habits to shorten the distance between who you are and who you want to be. One of the examples they give is of learning a language while doing push-ups. And I thought, I could do that.

Thankfully, language learning technology has come a long way since the last time I attempted to learn Polish.

I started with the Duolingo, which had finally created a Polish course. 

Duolingo is an excellent, free language learning program that gives you quick 3-minute immersive language lessons that are in a gamified format. Duolingo is so good that students can actually learn a language faster with Duolingo than if they were taking a college class. The sentences are funny, the courses are built around spaced repetition, so that they remind you of a word just when you are about to forget. And you can look up words if you need to: no judgement.

I love Duolingo and I’ve even gotten the rest of my family hooked. My husband is learning Spanish. My mom is learning Italian. As of this writing, my son has a Duolingo streak that is more than 460 days long in Polish and Spanish!

Starting in July 2022, I studied like a mad woman, fueled by 30+ years of existential frustration. For an entire month, I was working at a pace of one whole unit a day. I was studying three hours a day at least, sometimes more. I studied until my brain felt like mush. 

I completed the entire Polish Duolingo course less than 100 days. There were only 42 units in the Polish course (as opposed to 400 units in Spanish) but this was enough to finally get me over the hump!

In language, learning terms, getting to the end of Duolingo, plus having studied Pimsleur probably put me at the late beginner, CEFR A2 level. If you want to know what the CEFR levels are, you can watch this helpful video by Olly Richards. When I went to spend Christmas with my mother and grandmother that year, I was able to have full on conversations with them in Polish, and start reading simple graphic novels.

After completing Duolingo, I started doing a whole bunch of research about what to do next. Marissa Blaszko at Relearning a Language has a great resource for putting together your own language-learning plan. I found a whole host of amazing resources for learning polish, which I will link down below.

This is my current learning strategy:

Learn 10 new words a day from a frequency dictionary using the Anki mobile app.

According to Paul Pimsleur’s book How to Learn a Foreign Language, the slowest part of language acquisition is learning new vocabulary and moving that vocabulary from short term memory to long term memory. He recommends aiming to learn about 10 new words a day. It’s possible to do more, but given that language learning usually takes a few years, most people can sustainably do about new 10 words say. That has been the most comfortable pace for me.

One of the best way to get those new words into long-term memory is to used a spaced-repetition system. I like using Anki, which is basically a flashcard app, favored by language learners and medical students.

• YouTube: Anki Tutorial – Anki options and Algorithm — Is a helpful video for setting up your Anki deck so that it is optimized for language learning
• YouTube: How to make AMAZING Flashcards with Anki — Walks you through how to make good Anki flashcards

I put a lot of effort into making high-quality flashcards, but once I have them all set up, the daily practice of studying new words usually takes less than 30 minutes, spread out in short bursts throughout the day.

Choosing which words study is incredibly important for making progress because not all words are used equally. As Nathaniel Drew explains in this video, it’s best to focus on an essential core of vocabulary and then extend that in widening circles.

I’ve been putting my flashcards together using this series of Polish Frequency Dictionaries:

– Book 1: Polish Frequency Dictionary: Essential Vocabulary (2500 Most Common Polish Words) — This book has been invaluable for setting up my flash cards because it provides the 2,500 most common words in Polish, along with a example sentences so that you can read how it is used in context.

As of December 2023, I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through studying this book and I have been astonished at how effective it has been in expanding my vocabulary.

By the time I finish studying this book, my vocabulary will be big enough to know 92% of spoken Polish, and 82% of written Polish.

When I finish studying this book, I may continue with the series with Book 2: Intermediate Vocabulary (2501-5000 Most Common Polish Words) and Book 3: Advance Vocabulary (5001-7500 words) or I will take a break and focus on adding words I’m learning from reading novels.

Grammar study with the help of ChatGPT

Polish grammar is different than English grammar. It has seven grammatical cases, and it doesn’t have a lot of articles. Instead, the beginnings and endings of the words themselves change to indicate what is happening in the sentence. Basically this means that it is complicated enough to warrant getting grammar books and just slowly plugging through them, one lesson at a time.

– Marissa Blaszko recommends the Krok po Kroku textbook series. However, this book is written all in Polish, which is great in some ways…but also intimidating.

Polish grammar resources I have found helpful…

• Basic Polish Grammar by Dana Bielec—Has English explanations of Polish grammar rules, along with plenty of exercises, exceptions, and an answer key in the back.
• Polish for Dummies by Daria Gabryanczyk—Really breaks down basics of Polish grammar and provides a list of common phrases a person might use while traveling.
• The Polyglot Club Wiki for language learners — A wikipedia-style website that has lots of mini-lessons to help explain Polish grammar.
• I also like the Course of Polish YouTube channel because the teacher draws helpful charts and comes up with cute mnemonic devices to help remember the rules.

The biggest help of all has been asking ChatGPT to be my Polish language tutor. This video by Bri Does AI has some helpful tips for how to go about this. My strategy has basically been to ask it things like: 

• “Can you explain the nominative grammatical case to me?”
• “Can you give me 25 example sentences of the genitive case, with the words in that case written in bold?”
•  “I’m going to write 10 Polish sentences in the present tense. Could you rewrite these sentences in the past tense and future tense, and show me in bold what you changed about my sentence to change verb tenses?”

Immersion in 5 main areas

Reading—Years ago, I was really inspired by this blog post on LinguaTrek, which was about the author’s experience of learning Polish by reading Harry Potter. I really love the idea of this method.

I also liked this FluentU article about 9 Useful Strategies for Reading in a Foreign Language. In essence, it recommends you choose a book you really love and go through it in multiple different rounds:

• Round 1: Get the gist of the passage. Underline words you don’t know, but don’t look them up. Just see if you can figure out what the passage is about. It’s really great to have the audiobook as well, so that you can learn the pronunciation and inflection of what you are reading.
• Round 2: Slow, detailed read where you look up every single word you don’t know, and make a list to add to your SRS system.
• Round 3: Once you’ve learned all the new words, read it again.
• Round 4: Read aloud, either along with an audiobook or with a native speaker. Your aim is for speed and fluency.

I love reading, and I’ve been working up to being able to do more of this. This year I only managed to read five books in Polish (mostly graphic novels or audiobooks), but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to transition to middle grade and young adult novels in this upcoming year. It’s rather difficult to find Polish books in America, so I’ve been ordering them online from The Polish Bookstore online and the Apple Bookstore, which seems to have a wider selection of books in Polish than Amazon or Audible. There are also a handful of public domain Polish classics on LibroVox and the Project Gutenberg.

I’ve also had the language on my phone set to Polish for about a year.

Writing—I’ve been writing weekly letters to my mother and grandmother in Polish, with the help of Google Translate. I’ve also been Bullet Journaling in Polish since September 2022.

Listening— Linsdey Does Languages has a helpful tutorial for setting up your Netflix account to show films in your target language. I’ve set up multiple language accounts for both our family’s Netflix and DisneyPlus accounts. Truthfully, though, I don’t watch much TV so most of my Polish listening has been YouTube channels like Dave z Ameryki, podcasts, music playlists, and audiobooks.

Matt vs Japan has a really excellent YouTube series about how important it is to just create a wall of sound in your target language. His advice is basically to have your target language constantly going in the background, even when doing other things.

I asked ChatGPT to create a music playlist for me based on the music I like. You can listen to that playlist here. What’s neat about YouTube Music is that it will also show the lyrics, so occasionally I will translate the lyrics, if I can’t figure out what the song is about just based on listening.

I found a really cool app (that I haven’t made much use of yet) called LingoClip, which is basically an app that helps you learn language through singing karaoke. Awesome!

Speaking—This is my weakest area. I could be doing so much more, but I’m still quite shy. My mother and grandmother are absolutely thrilled every time I speak to them in Polish, so I aspire to do it more often. This year, I did recently have a conversation with my mom that lasted 30 minutes, all in Polish.

Culture and History—I found this wonderful website called Culture.PL which has excellent articles on Polish history and culture. I subscribe to their newsletter.

I’ve been reading and translating the works of great Polish writers and poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski.

I’ve also been listening to historical and non-fiction books by English-speaking authors about Poland, such as John Pomfret’s From Warsaw with Love, James Michener’s Poland, James Conroyd Martin’s The Warsaw Conspiracy trilogy, No Simple Victory by Norman Davies, and We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter.

Since I’m a writer, I’ve also been reading as much as I can about Polish history, literature, mythology, and about slavic culture for some wonderful books I’m planning on writing at some point in the future.

I have begun writing historical fantasy short stories set in Poland. I hope to collect these interconnected short stories into a book, tentatively called Beads of Amber. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress.

I’m also considering writing an illustrated collection of Polish fairy tales and myths, tentatively titled Slavic Spirits, similar in style to D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths.

Who knows what the next few years will bring?