Denial

I speak good the Polish. I learn heem from a book.

The problem is, I don't always understand heem very well.

And this is where we enter the Denial Phase.

The Denial Phase comes when you've spent a year living in a place and making all the effort in the world to learn the language. You learn to like the food, you get hip and hang with the local kids, you drink your tea with raspberry syrup in winter, you laugh at that stupid advert with John Cleese... You can do languages. You are the interpreter (heaven help us).
You come to hate it when people speak to you in English. It makes you feel like a stupid foreigner, who hasn't been working their little cotton socks off all year to get their head round what is actually a mind-bogglingly complicated language. You don't understand everything, but you're damned if you're going to let them know that!

Below are two classic examples of the Denial Phase in the process of linguistic acquisition.

Scenario 1:
On Saturday a friend asked me- if I happened to be passing through town- to book tickets for the evening screening of The Bucket List* at Ars cinema.** I duly queued up and asked the guy for three tickets. Usually the trailers give the film's original title, so I always have to check the Polish title on the listings before I book. I hesitated a fraction of a second too long, and my pronunciation was just a little bit too dodgy, and the guy answered me in English:
- How many?
I snarled at him.
- Dobrze rozumiem po polsku!
He looked at me, taken aback, and continued in Polish (in spite of my mistakes), albeit very cautiously, as one does when there are only a few inches of reinforced plastic to separate one from a raving madwoman.
And he gave me a student discount: another bonus- everyone assumes young foreigners are here to study...

Scenario 2:
I sneak home for lunch on Monday and decide to pick up an obwarzanek from the stand on the corner of Starowiślna and Westerplatte. I order, the lady goes to fish out the required baked item with that metal prong thing, and as she bends down, she asks me a question, to which I give a neutral reply, having not caught what she said. She puts the bare pretzel in that little dish thing on top of the stand, and I go to fish out a plastic bag from the packet next to it.
- Ah, but I already asked you if you wanted a plastic bag.
- I know, but...
- Ah ha, you didn't understand (she looked so smug at this point)
- Actually I understand perfectly well! I said, crossly. 'There was a tram passing at the time and I didn't hear!'
- ah you didn't understand... (she was still tutting away to herself)
- There was A TRAM!

And the obwarzanek was stale. Which was somehow very fitting.


*A very sentimental film. But not as bad as Mała Wielka Miłość. From now on I am only going to see movies where people get stabbed violently. I have high hopes for Nadzieja.

** Pronounced the way you think it is. Sometimes hard to suppress the urge to follow it up with 'Feck! Drrrink! Gurrrls!'.