At the moment, the language school is teaching us traits of character. This involves listening to, and reproducing, somewhat articificial versions of standard office-photocopier chat. At least, as I imagine it: we don't actually have a photocopier.
It ranges from:
- I don't understand why you're still seeing Monika. She is shy and self-contained.
- I disagree with you! She is a great girl! And she works very hard!
to:
- You can't say a bad word about Jacek! He's so tall, intelligent and handsome!
- But he's always late for meetings! And he irritates me!
There's potential for a lot of fun here. My flatmates are away this weekend, so I'm going to have to find other Poles to practice on. The Bad Obwarzanki Lady may be in for a surprise.
To help get the ball rolling, our Polish teacher brought out a sort of board game, with questions on each square.
We started with 'What sort of person do you like to work with?', and from there things began to get heated.
My turn came.
'Describe someone with character traits that you don't like'.
- This person (I thought for a moment) ... is disorganized...
... disorganized, and scatty, and uhhh not punctual and arrogant and thinks they know everything and untrustworthy and unreliable and... and... can't cook and never cleans and...
I paused for breath. The windows had begun to steam up.
My Polish teacher and my classmate looked somewhat taken aback:
- Humm. Okropna osoba!
- Uhh... nie zupełnie. Miał zalety... ale nie pamiętam...
NB: I find it extremely hard to pronounce the title of this post. In English it's sort of like 'tse[x]y [x]harakteru', where [x] is like 'loch' but more so. Must eat more cheese.
Language geek link of the day: http://pl.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kategoria:Cechy_charakteru
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7 comments:
Pinolona where do you take polish classes? It looks like mine have fallen through due to lack of numbers ..argh
Ah well there are only two of us in ours, but we're persistent!
Follow the link below, if it works:
http://www.polishforforeigners.com/
The school is called Accent. It's good. (Sponsoring 'pinolona.blogspot' since 2007. Payment welcome in cash only.)
Our class is EU A2 level - officially 'pre-intermediate' or 'advanced beginners', which loosely translates as: 'yeah, you think you're good now but theres a looooong way to go'.
Are you the same Anonymous who's going to take me round Nowa Huta or is that someone else? This anon lark isn't half confusing...
Uśmiałem się jak norka:)
Pawel
funnier still if you know the person I was talking about...
Ah I miss Polish classes... long hours of complete confusion, highlighted by the odd moment of realisation suddenly dawning. Such fun!
of course,that was just a joke. the fifth element is ,as you intelligently remarked, morphology itself .
-aw
-ica
-ka
Pinolona you are becoming awfully complacent with the blog these days. Sort it out! Yes we do know each other so it happens. Krakow is a very small place o omniscient one :)
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