Angielski as Ona is to be Learning (English in Poland pt. II)

In my previous post I gave a general overview of how the English language is used, who uses it, and why as well as how well they do so. I would now like to comment a bit on how English is taught, based on my limited observations and discussions with students here in Poland. I should stress that at no point is my intent to make fun of non-native speakers of English, especially considering that my Polish can be pretty funny at times. And I also don't want to make fun of non-native English speakers because over here they have me WAY outnumbered!

A major complaint I've heard from Polish students is that English classes are effectively the same each and every year, from grade school to college. The focus of each class is similar, and it's hard to get a feeling of real progress in the language. Practical experience tends to be somewhat limited as well, and I heard that in a lot of classes the students will "cheat" during conversation practice and speak in Polish, which defeats the purpose of the exercise.

Now, lest we say "lord, what fools these Polaks be," a lot of the complaints I've heard about English instruction here in Poland are very familiar to me, as they are some of the exact same complaints I have about how I learned Spanish. I remember learning all of these verb tenses and conjugations for all sorts of verbs...having learned hardly any nouns. I didn't even know what the Spanish word for "noun" was, and had to look it up. At my best I could read and write Spanish reasonably, but speaking and understanding it was difficult because that's not what we practiced. This was exacerbated by the fact that the dialogues we heard in class were completely different from what you hear on a Spanish-language TV broadcast, wherethecommentatorwillspeakquickandsmunchwordtogethandomitpartofmanyofthem. After having taken years of Spanish, I could kind of figure out dribs and drabs of what soccer commentators were saying, aside from, of course, GOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!

I observed in my last post that few people here speak English with me despite the fact that I would be an excellent conversation partner. I think a major reason this is the case is that many have a very real fear that they will look stupid in front of me. Part of this I think comes from an incomplete understanding of the United States, and how it is different from Poland in one major respect. I would say that the average American from a large city is used to hearing English spoken with inaccurate grammar and a heavy accent. We are used to trying to figure out what somebody means. That doesn't seem to be the case as much over here. Now, that's gradually changing as people move here from farther east and from the south, and in general I have to say the Poles I've met have been great at trying to understand me when I attempt to speak their language. But I would wager that for most Poles, hearing a heavy foreign accent with weird grammar is a bit of a novelty, and so they assume this must be the case for English speakers as well.

In Poland, I've noticed that a very real stress is placed on speaking the language correctly. I once had a conversation with someone only to have a complete third-party stranger jump in and correct my grammar (which in a place like New York would probably be met with a response like "please to be go screwing yourselves.") On more than one occasion I've made a bit of a hash of a sentence when talking to a stranger and had that person very superciliously repeat that sentence with the correct grammar, not because they didn't understand what I said but because they were, well, correcting me. People do do this in the States, but usually not when speaking to a random foreigner in the street. The long and short of it is, people really care about the language over here and assume that Americans feel exactly the same way about their own. We really don't, to the point where there are a great number of native speakers who don't speak grammatically either. 

So, what's difficult about English for the average Polish speaker? First and foremost, definite and indefinite articles. Polish does not have definite articles such as "a", "an", or "the", the need for these being obviated partially by the case that a noun takes and partially by the fact that "this" is generally used in the place of "the", i.e. "pass me that spoon" or just "pass me spoon" is grammatical in Polish, but "pass me the spoon" isn't used (I'll give a more thorough description of grammatical case later). In fact, many Polish speakers seem to decide whether or not to use an article by flipping a coin.

Poles will occasionally have trouble with English word order. I never realized how strict word order was in English until I did some translations from Polish. Because Polish has cases and case endings, and because adjectives must agree with the nouns they modify, it does not make a difference whether you say "black car" or "car black." While the order of a Polish sentence is still generally subject-verb-object, thanks to case endings it is very clear what the subject and object of any given sentence is, meaning that an order of object-verb-subject is understandable. A good example of a kind of word order that is perfectly normal in Polish is an old joke about what "CCCP" stands for: "cep cepa cepem popycha/pogania." The very literal translation of this sentence would be "a fool a fool with flail pushes/chases", subject-object-adverb-verb. A translation which actually makes sense would read "A fool chases a fool with a flail", subject-verb-object-adverb. The rigidity of English word order sometimes causes problems for Poles, although this is more noticeable in writing than it is in speaking.

Of course, some English words are hard to pronounce. This might be hard to believe considering that Polish has great words like "chrabąszcz" and "Szczebrzeszyn" in it, but it's true. In particular, "th" is hard for pretty much any European. English dipthongs are hard to pronounce for just about any European outside of Holland. English also has a bunch of different ways to pronounce each noun, and its spelling famously makes no sense.

What's been very interesting for me to observe is that a speaker will have problems pronouncing a foreign language or foreign word even if said word is made up entirely of sounds that speaker is used to making. It has also been interesting to do some informal comparisons between non-native speakers of English and how a native speaker of, say, Chinese, has very different problems with the language compared to a native speaker of Polish.  

In the next post, I will finally get to the Polish language, which on a good day is spoken in an almost entirely grammatical manner by its native speakers.