Early on Tuesday evening I was just going about my day, still celebrating the new job that I had gotten the previous morning when an email pinged its way into my inbox saying that I had a meeting two days later with a potential new personal assistant. It turned out as I read, that she would replace the temporary one who was needed back in Stirling. I happened to mention the email that I had just read to Kirsty one of my other personal assistants who just happened to be on shift. Kirsty informed me that not only was she good friends with my potential employee but also that she was from Poland .
I felt like I couldn’t learn German for Lisa my German PA and just not bother learning any polish to help this person!
after a brief period of annoyance at the fact that on Monday I was just starting to get along with the temporary employee, I remembered Julia, the polish girl who I went to primary school with! Everything happens for a reason! Now excited, I decided to text my old friend even though I was not sure if she would even remember me as we hadn’t seen each other for eight years, and ask her for some polish lessons.
I was so pleased to hear that of course she remembered me and after a quick catch up we agreed the best way for her to teach me was for her to send me videos of written polish words and her saying them. She said that she would send me some the next day.
the next day, my temporary personal assistant was working but I was still quite annoyed with the situation so I mostly locked myself in my room and got on with my college work so I could speak to her as little as possible! Just when I was onto the second last sentence of my college work, Julia sent my phone into a pinging frenzy as she sent me my first ten videos! My brain has the special ability to seamlessly transition from one language to another in a second so I momentarily parked my German college stuff and opened my messenger which was still going cookoo-bananas and started watching the videos!
after a mere 5 minutes of learning, Julia happened to ask me a question and I responded with “tak” which is polish for yes! I couldn’t quite believe how quickly I was learning the language! By the end of the day I had totally mastered dziękuje (Chen-queer) which is thank you and I felt motivated to carry on learning.
the following morning my appointment with my potential employee went extremely well. I was keen to take her on so I emailed the woman in charge of my staff and said that I did in fact want her on my staff. Even though I can’t believe it, I have now made learning polish part of my daily routine!
in conclusion, on Monday morning I had no idea what was going to happen this week and if someone told me that today I would be writing an article about learning polish, I would have laughed but it just backs up my finial point in my previous article Why are We Doing This? that you are going to need a language. I am really looking forward to exploring the polish language with my new personal assistant and who knows? Maybe one day my polish will be as good as my German.
I would also like to say dziękuje to Julia for reconnecting with me and helping me on this unexpected adventure 💜
e e m mcgrath
The Non Verbal Linguist 