I’ve spent the past several hours composing a letter to a
relative in Poland,
with whom I have recently connected. I
have learned a few words and phrases over the past couple of months through my
inconsistent podcast usage and practice.
Yet, I know nothing of sentence structure and verb conjugation, my
knowledge of assigning proper gender articles and endings to objects is
minimal, and I generally spell Polish words phonetically in my podcast notes
because it’s far too complicated otherwise.
Needless to say, these factors make for an interesting letter, and I
imagine that she derives much amusement from my feeble attempts at writing in
the Polish language.
During my writing sessions, I am constantly revising
sentences for the sake of simplicity.
Although, I find Polish to be a challenging language, it is really quite
straight-forward and to the point, which is demonstrated by the significant
lack of Polish equivalents to English articles and other filler words. I also greatly mistrust the accuracy of online
translation tools. As a result, I
translate the Polish word or phrase provided by the translator back into
English, in order to see how jumbled my message became in a matter of
seconds. It reminds me of the telephone
game, in which a sentence is whispered from one person to the next, all the way
down the line, until the final player states aloud something entirely different
from what the group began with. When I
am really struggling with the online translator to produce a translation with
some resemblance to my original meaning, I pull out my hefty Polish-English
dictionary to do it the old-fashioned way.
But, finally, my letter is complete and ready to mail and,
hopefully, does not contain too many awkward mistakes!
