Jun. 1st, 2009 11:24 am
Zawody bokserskie
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muckefuckI really was Slug Boy this past weekend. Yesterday, in an attempt to compensate, I took some boxes and bags over to my old place and started packing and then tossed a massive load of laundry in the washer when I got back. I've been cherrypicking my bookshelves with each new fancy, so you'd think by now I'd have the core of my collection at Pod Klonami, but I just know I'll be onto something new the moment everything I have on it is inaccessible. This time, I seized everything even vaguely connected to Poland, including a cookbook, a Gombrowicz novella, and another language textbook.
The last time I tried halfheartedly to learn the language, Gerald Stone's An introduction to Polish was all I had to guide me, and it's not easy on the learner. He introduces four cases and two conjugations in the first five chapters, not one of which is longer than five pages. Now that I've worked my way through a hundred plus pages of Swan, however, it's a breeze. (And this despite the much more routine nature of the narratives and dialogues. Which reminds me, the latest gem from Swan: A więc jesteś nawet nudniejszy, niż myślałem "Well then you're even more boring than I thought.") I particularly appreciate Stone's detailed notes on pronunciation, which have definitively answered some questions that have been nagging me (such as whether ę is denasalised in się and whether moim is pronounced in one syllable or two).
Incidentally, one thing I've found increasingly charming about Polish as I've gone along are the Germanisms. That may not be the best description, since I'm not always sure these are due to German influence on Polish rather than being coincidences or areal features or what-have-you, but it's always nice to find something familiar amid so much that is novel. For instance, the word for "walk" in Polish as "go for a walk" is spacer--clearly from the same source as German spazieren. In the unit on telling time, I was initially baffled by the translation of Pierwszy seans jest o wpół do dziewątej as "The first show is at 8:30" because the word for "eight", osiem, doesn't appear anywhere. Then it occurred to me that expression is literally "at half of the ninth [hour]"--an equivalent to the German halb neun rather than the English half eight.
The last time I tried halfheartedly to learn the language, Gerald Stone's An introduction to Polish was all I had to guide me, and it's not easy on the learner. He introduces four cases and two conjugations in the first five chapters, not one of which is longer than five pages. Now that I've worked my way through a hundred plus pages of Swan, however, it's a breeze. (And this despite the much more routine nature of the narratives and dialogues. Which reminds me, the latest gem from Swan: A więc jesteś nawet nudniejszy, niż myślałem "Well then you're even more boring than I thought.") I particularly appreciate Stone's detailed notes on pronunciation, which have definitively answered some questions that have been nagging me (such as whether ę is denasalised in się and whether moim is pronounced in one syllable or two).
Incidentally, one thing I've found increasingly charming about Polish as I've gone along are the Germanisms. That may not be the best description, since I'm not always sure these are due to German influence on Polish rather than being coincidences or areal features or what-have-you, but it's always nice to find something familiar amid so much that is novel. For instance, the word for "walk" in Polish as "go for a walk" is spacer--clearly from the same source as German spazieren. In the unit on telling time, I was initially baffled by the translation of Pierwszy seans jest o wpół do dziewątej as "The first show is at 8:30" because the word for "eight", osiem, doesn't appear anywhere. Then it occurred to me that expression is literally "at half of the ninth [hour]"--an equivalent to the German halb neun rather than the English half eight.
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