Lightning Polish in Lublin.

Schedule: Covered four cases quickly in my three weeks in Lublin -- instrumental, accusative, genitive, and dative, with much new vocabulary, and lots of exceptional verbs. For me, an overwhelming lesson in humility as I really, really struggled through each three-hour morning class. Then an optional lecture on cultural issues by Polish professors, with lunch (obiad) served at 1:30. I signed up for the highly-intensive level, with a 50-minute individual tutoring session at 3 pm.  kolacja). The program included cultural enrichment, with weekend tours and day trips.

We had a 90-minute group conversation class from 5-6:30 pm, followed by a light dinner.

We were tested each Friday. We had excellent instructors, and I met students from Ukraine, Ruanda, Chile, Bolivia, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Scotland, Iran, Canada, Nigeria, and the US.  

Location: John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (known as KUL). In the central courtyard is a statue with Pope John Paul II embracing his kneeling mentor, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. It honors the stalwart resistance of Wyszynski and his three years of house arrest under the communists.

Lodging.  Room in a student dormitory in downtown Lublin, but moved to the university hotel on campus. 

The only spot available: the rector’s roomy apartment. Street noise with buses, trucks, and the constant “beep-beep-beep” of street-crossing signals, but very close to everything on campus.

Highlights:  A university television team filmed an interview about Jerzy and the book – it will be weeks before it is available.  Thanks to them, the archives staff let me look at the documents KUL has on Jerzy’s studies. I spent hours going over every line on every piece of paper in his file. That process lifted my spirits. I also searched the inner courtyard where Jerzy and his Aunt Mary Kalinoski took photographs of each other when they visited KUL in 1975.  Much has changed, but the window locations are the same.  Jerzy had his classes in the same building as our Polish classes.

Two possible miracles: I found an automatic transmission car and will soon begin the great adventure of retracing Jerzy’s 1978 route through the former Yugoslavia. And I got an 86 on my final Polish exam, though I am virtually certain I will never be fluent.

According to one internet site, Polish is rated the fourth hardest language for English speakers to learn:

Polish is spoken by 40 million people worldwide, but compared to many other languages on this list, very few learn it as a second language. The difficulty of Polish lies in a couple of important factors: the first is basic pronunciation. A simple hello, “Cześć,” is a nightmare for most foreigners, combining the heavy, strung-together “cz” and the high, sibilant “ś,” followed immediately by a similarly sibilant yet dropping “ć.” (By the way, none of these sound anything like an English “s” or “c.”). This is where Polish gets its reputation for being very “hissy.” The second, perhaps more grave difficulty, lies in the many grammatical layers of the language. Cases alone are impossible to grasp perfectly, especially for English speakers used to a single case. Poles have seven cases, and each is in turn affected by gender; and Poles have seven grammatical genders, not just two. You can decline any noun in seven different ways, while numericals can have up to 17 forms – yes, that’s 17 ways of saying ”six.” For good measure, try this Polish tongue-twister:  „W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.”