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Double your pleasure

Saturday 20 November 2004 | 2 Comments

In Polish, there are two plural forms for every noun.

It works like this. For numbers 2 through 4, and anything number that includes those numbers (i.e., twenty-two, thirty-five, but not eleven, twelve), there is one plural form; for numbers 5-10, there is another plural form.

“Huh?”

Exactly.

An example might help. “Piwo” is “beer” in Polish. “Two beers” would be “dwa piwa.” “Four beers” would be “cztery piwa.” But “five beers” is “pięć piw.” But at “twenty-one” (yes, I know — who needs to know how to say “twenty-one beers” in Polish?), it would change back to “piwa.” Until you decided to get really wasted and go for twenty-five, at which point you would order “dwadzieścia pięć piw.”

Another example: “Roll” in Polish is “bułka.” “Two rolls” is “dwie bułki.” At five we get the switch again: “pię bułek.” At twenty-one, it goes back to “bułki.”

Further, if you want to use a plural noun as a direct object in a positive sentence, you use the first plural form; if you want to use it as a direct object of a negative sentence, you use the second form. In other words, to say “I like rolls” you use “bułki,” but to say “I don’t like rolls,” you use “bułek.”

And Poles wonder why their language is so hard for non-Poles…

Any linguistic strangeness where you live?

Underheard

Thursday 18 November 2004 | 0 Comments

What is it about the popularity lately of singing through one's nose? This one is the absolute winner, but it seems to be the "in" thing now.

I was at a bar here in Poland with a friend sometime when that atrocious Anastacia song "Paid My Dues" came on the radio. "Read all the lyrics, sorry though they may be

As Anastacia sang, my friend got that lost-in-the-moment look, then asked me, "What is this song about?"

"I don't really know," I replied. "I've never really paid much attention to it."

"But I don't get it. 'Paint my juice?' What is that supposed to mean?"

Is nothing sacred?

Thursday 18 November 2004 | 1 Comment

In Poland, separation of church and state doesn't exist, and priests teach religion courses in publicly funded schools.

Today I caught a student writing cheat notes on his arm for a quiz he was having in religion class!

"You realize that when you take a test and you cheat, it's the same as lying, right?" I asked him.

"How so?"

"Well, when you take a test, aren't you implicitly saying that you're taking the information only from your own knowledge?" I asked.

"I guess," he muttered.

"Then cheating is a form of lying," I concluded.

A thoughtful moment. "So?"

So, indeed.

The Sky Was Falling

Wednesday 17 November 2004 | 1 Comment

For most of my life, I’ve awoken not having the slightest idea what I dreamt the night before. I could probably count on my fingers the number of dreams I’ve ever vividly remembered. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ever been terribly interested in dreams or their interpretation.

I’ve only once had a recurring dream. I was in second grade. It was not a time of anxiety for me, as first grade had been, and I was fairly optimistic about my prospects in life. Then suddenly, it began, and continued for at least four nights that I can remember. The same dream, every night – little or no variation.

I’m a court attendant, and I’ve recently been placed in charge of organizing a grand ball for our queen. I was given such a budget that I even did major redecorating in the ballroom, and had an enormous mirror installed on the ceiling. The chandeliers had been removed, and all the light was provided by candles along the wall. I oversaw the menu; I hand-picked the orchestra; I had a multitude of designers working on the decorations.

Finally, the evening of the ball. The guests arrived and were milling about in the ballroom, waiting for the queen’s arrival. And then – the fanfare. The queen’s footmen enter, with her close behind, elegantly dressed. “She is surely impressed with all this,” I think to myself. “It’s going to be the greatest ball ever.” And then I hear a creaking, splintering sound above us all. I look up to see that the mirror has broken apart and is falling in hundreds of pieces. I look at the queen – she’s not aware of what’s going on. I look back up, then back to the queen, thinking “Someone has got to get her out of here!” I take a step in that direction

and I always woke up at that moment.

Four nights. Maybe more.

This is only a test

Monday 15 November 2004 | 2 Comments

Three of the seven classes had a test today on passive voice. You all know what "passive" means, right? You remember getting those papers back from your high school teacher with "passive" scribbled in the margin and wondering, "What the hell does that mean?"

My handy-dandy, five-step, active-to-passive transformation guide.
1. What is the main verb?
2 .What tense is the main verb in?
3. What is the direct object?
4. What is the verb "be" in the tense from question two?
5. What is the past participle of the verb from question one?
And then -- 3+4+5=passive voice

If you're a non-native English speaker reading this, I'm sure you don't need this explained.

And that's the irony of it all. In many ways, non-native English speakers know grammar much better than thoseof us who grew up speaking the language.

There's a whole side of our native language that we native speakers don't naturally know. For example, if I were to challenge most Americans to construct a sentence in present perfect continuous tense in the subjunctive voice, there might be a bit of head scratching, even thoughthey would understand the sentence, "I would have been writing this forever if you hadn't helped." (Yeah, thatexample is a bit awkward, but it works.)

When I first came to Poland to teach English, I had no idea about many such things. For instance, what's wrong with the sentence, "I have done it yesterday"? Several years ago, though I was an English major in college, I would have had a hard time explaining. Now, it's simple: "I have done it" is in present perfect tense, and present perfect tense is used for the indefinite past. "Yesterday" is fairly definite, I would say.

Back to the issue at hand: passive voice. A sentence is passive if the subject is not the "doer" of the verb. For example: A ball was thrown. They ball had nothing to do with the action -- it indeed received the action. The active would be something like, "My mother threw the ball."

Today's test was designed to check students' ability to change sentences from active to passive, as well as to decide when a sentence should be passive and when active. Some samples from the test:

  • (President / send / me / a letter of congratulations || Present Simple) A letter...
  • (People / write / more books about computers / than about any other subject || Present perfect) More books . . .

Correct answers:

  • A letter of congratulations was sent to me by the president.
  • More books are written about computers than about any other subject.

Some involved just putting the verb in the correct tense. Sort of.

  • This car ______. It's too old. (not/to steal - Future Simple)
  • This street ______ because of snow. (already/to close - Present Perfect)

Among the English-to-Polish translation (a rarity in my tests) were "tree sap" and "unleaded." Results, thus far, are less than spectacular.

Shakes and Kisses

Monday 15 November 2004 | 3 Comments

I’ve lived in Poland now for over six years, and there’s a custom I still haven’t come to terms with — the handshake.

In the States, we shake hands only when we first meet someone, or when we’re in some very formal environment. In Poland the handshake is much more common.

In short, you should shake hands with someone if:

  1. You’re a man.
  2. You encounter a man.
  3. You know the man you’re encountering or
  4. He’s with a man you do know.

You shake hands in bars, when you arrive at work, when you pass on the street. Kids shake hands; old men shake hands with young men; directors with teachers — everyone shakes hands.

Some examples:

  • If you go to a bar and you see a friend sitting at a table, you go shake his hand, and you offer your hand to every other man who’s sitting at the table.
  • If you’re walking down the street and an acquaintance is walking the other way, you shake hands, even if you just continue walking.
  • If you’re a student, you shake hands with all your friends every day. Sometimes you see a boy just moving down the hall, shaking hands like a politician.

But it’s not so simple as that. You’re only supposed to shake hands when you first meet each other. Other encounters during the day don’t get the shake.

Traditionally, you’re not supposed to offer your hand to a woman. Indeed, in a really traditional, formal setting, men still kiss women’s hands in Poland.

I’m still not sure when I’m supposed to offer my hand and when I’m not. Rather, I forget. I walk by an acquaintance on the sidewalk and I realize three steps too late that I only said “Czesc” and didn’t offer my hand.

As far as kissing women’s hands go, well, I just keep away. It seems too cavalier (pun intended) for me to do it.

But I kiss men here. In fact, I’ve kissed every single male teacher with whom I work. The three peck, right-cheek, left-cheek, right-cheek-again mwa-mwa-mwa kiss. The triple peck is used in congratulatory situations: name days, weddings, etc. and it’s the most difficult for me, an American, to get used to. After all, while I really like my director, I don’t want to kiss him on a regular basis. But from time to time, at a teacher�s meeting, we give a birthday gift to one of the teachers and then we all line up and mwa-mwa-mwa.

At our wedding, Kinga and I kissed almost all our guests . . .

Make You Squeal Like a Pig

Sunday 14 November 2004 | 1 Comment

This is going to be pretty disgusting. Fair warning.

Part of the preparation for my wedding to a Polish woman who grew up in a very rural area was a pig killing. My father-in-law bought a pig from a farmer some months before the wedding, and then about two weeks before, it was time to kill and dress the pig.

I shot some birds with a shotgun when I was little; I killed a mouse out of mercy because my cat was torturing it -- I've never seen anything quite that big killed before.

My father said "pig" is the wrong word. "It was a hog," he says.

I'll spare the gruesome details for now. What astounded me was the behavior of the butcher's grandchildren. I was sick to my stomach a few times (but taking pictures nonetheless), and they were running around as if it were a Baptist picnic.

And they sat for a moment, and I was able to get the above picture.

EFL Materials

Saturday 13 November 2004 | 0 Comments

Ever wonder what an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbook looks like? I certainly did as I was preparing to come to Poland for the first time back in 1996. After all, how often do you get to see a textbook teaching something you already know fluently? Naturally, after four and a half years' experience, I've seen and used more textbooks than I care to remember. I thought I'd share a little about the books I've been using.

Most units tend to be thematic. For example, for practicing modal verbs such as "should," "must," and "have to" (among others), this particular book (and many others) use the idea of advice and "Doing the right thing."

There are certain groups of easily-confused words, and some activities are aimed at improving students' ability to choose the correct word from a similar pair. This particular book is written specifically for Polish students, and so that influenced the word choice (in other words, they might not seem like similar words in English, but they are in Polish translation, so . . .).

There are three tenses in Polish; there are twelve in English. When to use which tense can be somewhat confusing for students. Even remembering how to make them all can be difficult, so sometimes we have "easy" lessons that just make students think about how to make the tenses. (This particular exercise uses Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner," a rather popular song in Poland, making this one of the most popular lessons I've ever taught.)

Obviously, the most basic element needed to be able to use a foreign language is an adequate vocabulary.

Teaching English in Poland presented some special challenges. For instance, articles: when to use "a," when to use "an," and when to use "the." Polish doesn't have articles, so the sentence "Id? do sklepu" could be translated "I'm going to a shop" or "I'm going to the shop." Teaching students when to use which was initially very difficult.

The most difficult part, though, would be orthography: getting kids to remember that the dark part of a 24-hour period is "night" and a medieval soldier is a "knight" and they're both pronounced the same.

Irritation Squared

Friday 12 November 2004 | 0 Comments

Today I went with Kinga (my wife, for the uninformed) and my father-in-law to Kinga’s brother’s house, which is being built just outside of Krakow. Kinga’s brother is now out of the country, so my father-in-law is taking care of the building process while he’s gone.

The house is “standing raw,” to translate directly from Polish. This means that the walls are done, the roof is done, and it’s ready for the interior finishing.

Houses here are built out of blocks and concrete, not the tooth-pick contracting familiar in America. My friend who spent some time in American working in construction said, “A house like that wouldn’t last a week here. The father would come home drunk one night and destroy the whole thing!"

Recently, the concrete for the floors was poured. There was to be five centimeters of concrete on each floor, poured over ten centimeters of Styrofoam insulation. We went to check that that was done.

“You can’t trust anyone here!” says my father-in-law. When he really gets ranting, he likes to say,

“This country has no right to exist!” and “Poland must be the richest country in the world, because everybody’s stealing and cheating, and yet there’s still something left to steal.”

So Kinga and I measured the area of all the floors while her father drilled random holes in the concrete to check its thickness. The upstairs was fine, but the downstairs floors were one centimeter too thin.

“It’s ridiculous we have to do this,” I muttered as we went throughout the whole house and measured everything. I was talking to my father-in-law about this, and he said, “Oh, it’s surely the same thing happens all over the world.”

And suddenly, we litigation-happy Americans looked pretty good, because, as I said to him, “At least in the States, you could take this guy to court for not fulfilling the contract. What can you do here?” I asked.

“Not much. We’ve already paid.” The point of all the measuring was this: the same company is supposed to come and finish the walls as well, and the hope of negotiation is what motivated the day’s measuring.

But what struck me was the fact that no contractor here has a reputation for being honest.

As my father-in-law said, “You can’t trust anyone here.”

Why they do it

Wednesday 10 November 2004 | 2 Comments

“Michele asks in a comment if it’s “not MORE difficult to cheat in the field of English because of the essay style answers that are required?” Perhaps in theory, but remember: essays require vocabulary, which is conducive to cheating.

Explaining how students in Poland cheat leads naturally to explanations as to why they do it.

One of the reasons, I think, is the sheer number of courses they take every year. Here’s a list of courses for one third-year (senior) class:

  1. Polish
  2. History
  3. Mathematics
  4. Biology
  5. Chemistry
  6. Physics
  7. English
  8. German
  9. Computer science
  10. Geography
  11. PE
  12. Social studies
  13. Religion

That’s not possible courses — that’s the required course work. As opposed to the American system, where you have physics only your final year, with chemistry your junior year and biology as a sophomore, they have all three sciences throughout high school. Of course they don’t have each course every day. For example, senior students have four hours of English a week, and so they meet Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — like the university scheduling system in the States. Still, that’s an insane amount of studying every week.

A second cause, put forth by a teacher, was historical. “Teachers during communism were seen as the Establishment, and so it was a way to fight the establishment.” Sounds weak. I don’t buy it.

Option three: the rote memory required by many teachers necessitates it. This might have some merit. I know teachers here sometimes simply dictate from a book and the students just write down everything and vomit it back up the next lesson. Admittedly, I do something similar when I give vocabulary quizzes — and I give an obscene number of such quizzes. “Without words, all the grammar in the world won’t help you!” tell the kids.

Choice four, which is the most logical now: as a fellow English teacher put it, “We let them.” Pure and simple. I do my damnedest to stop them from cheating, and I sometimes fail them for even a glance to the side (and that’s no exaggeration — I do it early in the year with first-year students, usually with a not-so-important grade, to set a precedent), and I take no excuses. And yet they still cheat.

The cheating won’t disappear soon, I’m afraid. I always use as an example the cultural attitude in the States towards cheating, but I know that that is slowing being eroded and that more and more students are cheating in the States.