Ona je jabłka! - GENIUS HOUR #2

This week during my genius hour I decided I would go down the route of Duolingo!

It was a painfully humbling experience taking the placement test at the beginning, as I knew what all the phrases and sayings meant, and I was able to translate well enough (when there was a word bank at the bottom), but failed miserably when I had to write what I heard.

Now, I definitely understood what I heard.  Copying it however, was another story.  In Polish, there are apparently different sounds for the letter "ż" and "rz"as well as "ś" and "sz", but to me, they sound exactly the same.  So, when typing what I heard, sometimes I'd use "ż" when I was supposed to use "rz", or "sz" when I was supposed to use "ś".  This caused me to somehow fail the entire placement test, and I was to start the app at ground zero.  Now, I am aware that this is the exact opposite conclusion of what I had posted last week, but alas, I trust that Duolingo does not lie.

So, I spent 15 minutes a day this week practicing my Polish, and I only made a few mistakes!  I knew to tap each verb and each pronoun as they popped up, and wrote down the way it was spelt and the context in which it was used, so that I can look over it later on when I'm reviewing all the different conjugations.  That is, after all, my biggest struggle when trying to learn Polish.

I have now mastered that "oni" is the masculine plural of "they" and "one" is the feminine plural of "they".  This was an issue I struggled with for years! I knew one was masculine and one was feminine but I was never able to figure out which one was which.  I have also formed and translated every possible way of saying "he/she/they/ is/are eating an apple".  I'm at a point now where if I hear "ona je jabłka" (she is eating an apple) one more time I might throw my phone!


This week I was also able to practice a lot of my Polish while working at the farmers market.  I work with my best friend Nina and her family, the owners of "Wanda's Farm".  They are a full-blown Polish family, and so naturally attract a lot of Polish customers.  I did my best this week to speak only in Polish to our Polish customers.  A lot of the time I start by saying "dziendobry" (good morning) to our customers, and then swiftly move on to English when they have questions about our produce.  This week I was wearing my brave pants, and vowed to answer in Polish, even if I made mistakes.

Let me tell you, it went pretty well!  No one looked at me like I was an alien, or like I wasn't making any sense.  They continued to respond in Polish, and one woman even told me I had a very nice accent!

From the market, I have learned the words: "miękie" (soft), "dojrzały" (ripe), "mięsisty" (meaty),  "morela" (apricot), and "węgierski" (translates to Hungarian, but used to describe Italian plums).

It's working my friends. I am slowly building my way up the ranks!

I plan to continue using my Duolingo app for 15 minutes a day, and taking notes each time!  I also plan to continue watching videos on Youtube from Polish Youtubers, just to get used to the speed of their speaking, and to expand my vocabulary a lot more.  Lastly I plan to keep asking what words mean when I don't understand them.  I wouldn't have learned any of the words above had I not just asked later on what they meant!

I'm so excited my friends.  I love expanding my Polish. I feel so much more Polish than I ever have!

Note to Self: We Aren't Starting From Ground Zero! - GENIUS HOUR #1

So this week's Genius Hour was all about exploring how this is going to work.  How am I going to go about improving my Polish?  I figured I'd start with the basics, and searched for a video on YouTube. I searched "Learn Polish", as I thought being broad would be better.  I came across a video made by a channel called Learn Polish with PolishPod101.com.  The video was titled "Learn Polish in 30 Minutes, All the Basics You Need". You can watch the video for yourself here!

Very soon into watching this video, I realized I am much more advanced than I give myself credit for.  Granted, there were a few things I did learn, like saying "przyjemność po mojej stronie" (it's my pleasure) as a formal way of saying "you're welcome".  That was new to me!

I decided while I watched this video, that I was going to make a list of things I already know! The list is as follows:

© Ella Wiernikowski, 2018

While I was watching the video, Joanna would speak in English before speaking in Polish.  When she was explaining how to formally say "it is nice to meet you" to a woman, I preemptively tried to say it out loud in Polish before she did, to see if I would get it right.  To my surprise, I did not get it entirely right. My word for "Ma'am", "Pani", was different than Joanna's word, which was "Panią".  I know that "Panią" is a grammatical variation of "Pani", but what I don't understand is why it was used.  

So, I've come to the conclusion that when speaking Polish, a lot of the time I know which words to use, I just don't know how to use them correctly.  After having done a specialist in Linguistics during my undergrad, I've grown to have a real appreciation for grammar.  I think this is why I'm so motivated to improve my Polish, because it's the only one out of the three languages I can speak where I have next to no understanding of the grammatical structure.

So where do I go from here? What do I do with this new epiphany? Moving forward, I know now that my focus has changed from just "learning Polish" to "learning Polish grammar".  I am now on the hunt for a helpful website or program that will walk me through Polish grammar, not just Polish basics.  I can also speak to my father and grandmother, who I have asked to speak to me exclusively in Polish for the next six weeks, and ask them questions throughout the week as to why they used x instead of y in a sentence.  I'm hoping that the more I understand a word, the more likely I will be to use it correctly in a sentence next time!

I also plan to periodically read (simple) books and maybe watch a couple YouTube videos done by Polish YouTubers so I can expand my vocabulary and work on my fluency before my next Genius Hour.

I'll be sure to keep you all updated on my progress, so stay tuned next week for more!

What is Copyright?

As teachers, we have a very unique position when it comes to copyright. Everything that is created and put on the internet is copyrighted by law, and you have to have permission to use it in your day-to-day life.  So, what does that mean for teachers, since we essentially use copyrighted products every day of our teaching lives (unless you're a superhero and create brand new and innovative materials, that don't already exist, for every single lesson you do).

For the rest of the 99.9% of us, we use and adapt other peoples work all the time in our lessons, so we have the responsibility every day to properly cite and credit other peoples work by order of the Copyright Act.  Not only do we have the responsibility to cite and credit by law, but we have the responsibility to demonstrate proper accreditation to our students to give them a good base/foundation of citation/credit when they go on to secondary and post-secondary!

Dany13. (2011, April 21). Pict0400/Paris City/Notre Dame de Paris/Parvis. [Online Photo]. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/images/2fAm5P

Jarvis, Dennis. (2016, September 22). Poland - Old Town Market. [Online Photo]. Retrieved from  https://flic.kr/p/NiPApS.

Welcome!

Hi everyone, welcome to my blog!

For all my new readers, my name is Ella Wiernikowski, and I am currently a teacher candidate doing a Bachelor of Education at Brock University. Before this, I did my undergraduate at the University of Toronto.  I graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Arts having done a Specialist in French Linguistics.  I love French, and really just languages in general.  I speak three languages at the moment, English, French, and Polish (not fluently).  I've also started the exciting journey into learning ASL, but that's going to be a long work in progress.

If you couldn't tell, my hope is to be a Primary/Junior teacher in a French Immersion school.  I knew I wanted to teach French when I was about 13 years old, and have modelled my life around that goal ever since.  When I was in the 12th grade, I applied to be an Au Pair for the Wells family in Paris, and thankfully got the job! In very quick succession, I graduated high school, turned 18, and by the end of August I packed up and re-settled in Paris for the year! It was incredible. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about my Parisian journey! Since getting back I did my undergraduate degree in French, and have worked at summer camps and with Polish Scouting to get more work with children under my belt.

I do enjoy things other than languages my friends, so don't think I have a one-track mind! In my free time I love reading, doing yoga, watercolour painting, and bullet-journaling (if you don't know what that is, I highly recommend looking it up).

This blog is going to be centered around my life as a teacher, and my Genius Hour project. What is a Genius Hour project you might ask? Well, in my spare moments for the next six weeks, I am doing a personal project to help improve my fluency in Polish.  I am half Polish (in case my last name didn't give it away), but my other half is Irish/Canadian.  We speak next to no Polish at home, and aside from talking with my Babcia (grandmother), I don't get in a lot of practice. I'm hoping that by the end of my project, I feel more confident speaking, can read Polish with a bit more fluency, and am able to have a small conversation with a family member/loved one without using any English fillers!  A lot of these goals (aside from fluency while reading) will be hard to measure in scientific terms per-say, since I don't really have a way to measure my prior knowledge. I will be measuring my success mostly by how I feel while speaking, and if I can achieve a lesser amount of English fillers while speaking (none at all would be preferable).

I hope you decide to come on this journey with me, and maybe, learn something new!