Talk three.
Szczecin, 30th September
- The dates of the world tour have already been fixed.
- We won’t be able to change anything, right?
- No need to change. The dates of those eight most important flights impose the pace and rhythm of our trip. Let’s stick to that.
- When are we flying off?
- In the middle of November.
- What about my job?
- As the old Polish saying: „A job is not a hare. It will wait.” Seriously speaking, I think that with you being unemployed at the moment, and me being a fresh pensioner, right now we have a unique opportunity to leave for those five months. If you give me this time in which you might lose some of your professional experience, we will make a journey of life. The experience you may gain during it, will be useful for both of us.
- And what am I going to write in my CV, since I will have been almost a year without employment?
- You won’t have to hide the knowledge and experience acquired in other cultures, will you?
- Do I have to describe such experiences in detail?
- Don’t mock me. I’m serious. On the other hand, what kind of experiences do you expect?
- I have to tell you!
- May it! Sticking to your convention.
- What kind of experience did you get during your multiple journeys to the West?
- Professionally?
- Yaah. As well.
- Not to be underestimated. Foreign languages, first of all. Almost a year prior to the voyage to Chile I took up Spanish. Teaching myself.
- Yourself?
- Nobody else wanted to study with me.
- No teacher? No course?
- I could have tried a course but in such a provincial city of Szczecin there was no interest in studying Spanish. There were no such courses in town. Not until Szczecin had some fishery trade with Peru, there was a need of Spanish courses for the foreign trade employees.
- And then the courses started?
- One of Szczecin institutions which among other things organized courses of English with me as one of the teachers, asked me to teach Spanish as well.
- You agreed, didn’t you?
- It was a bit cheeky on my part, but I did.
- Your stay in Chile was long enough to master Spanish so that you could teach it?
- You see, what a genius I was. The truth is that I had been studying Spanish before the trip to South America, during my stay there, and some time after coming back home where I practiced it with many Latin Americans studying in Szczecin, and during my travels to Spain.
- You’d been studying. Just like that.
- Do you want me to quote here my never written guide book: How to learn a language in a short time?
- The shortest possible. .
- You need it to read it a part of it and put it back on a shelf?
- It might be practical for immediate use. With a guaranteed result.
- I’m going to disappoint you deeply. Studying a language may appear to you a boring and tedious chore.
- Did it make you bored and tired?
- Now I know. You are looking for an excuse for your attitude towards the matter.
- Now it’s going to be a long and boring lecture on how hopeless I am, and so on and so forth.
- Long ago did I stop giving you lectures on anything because we agreed on a strict division of our skills and competences. I have no reason to go on telling you that at home of a shoemaker many shoes have holes. Your languages don’t want to get repaired themselves. You agreed not to tease me on my particular skills in handling the electronic equipment at our place, whose amount is growing at an enormous pace.
- I can’t do much about my not enjoying to the least learning grammar and words by heart, and all the other complexities...
- I know, your scientific mind doesn’t really digest the written word.
- Stop it!
- Do you want a piece of advice how to learn (study) a language?
- No, I don’t. I want to able to speak languages!
- Good start! Really t r u e motivation is a guarantee of success for it supports perseverance and fights doubts that are part and parcel of the process of studying.
- And what if one lacks such motivation?
- One should drop the idea and take up other passions. Do you lack s u c h motivation?
- I’ve got difficulty in finding it in myself.
- You need the language for what you do in the net, don’t you?
- I can manage. So far so good. But I feel bad that I do not make any progress.
- We are trotting in circles. For the last time I’m giving you my advice. You are welcome to make use of it, but I don’t mean to force you. Your modesty doesn’t let you say that you are doing relatively well in English. But admit it, you hadn’t been sweating over English while studying it.
- Praising won’t contribute to my getting more language.
- Either way is not good for you. I assume that your motivation is the need of talking in the Net with many interesting people but your language limitations don’t allow you to communicate with them at the level you wish you had.
- Let’s assume you are right.
- The easiest technique is to set yourself language assignments for every day.
- What do you mean „for every day”?
- Every single day of the week, Saturday and Sunday including. With no exceptions, you need to devote twenty minutes for each of such assignments.
- Only twenty minutes. What kind of assignments should those be?
- Twenty minutes net. It’s a lot of time. Providing you won’t turn to other activities during that time. And the assignment should be something you choose yourself.
- And I am supposed to make myself do those „homeworks. Is that right?
- Yes, that’s right. That is all about it. You take any course-book at the level of English slightly above yours and you do the lessons step by step. Last three minutes of the session you should spare for getting a feedback answer: What is that I’ve been studying today? What have I learned today?
- What is it to be the result of such fragmented studying?
- Either ten new words or one short dialogue or one fragmented grammatical problem or three to five sentences of a story to be told or written… You decide yourself what to do. But the aims and the results must be coherent. You don’t move forward until you are absolutely sure that the assignment is completed hundred percent.
- Slavery!
- No, it isn’t. It’s a lot of fun! It’ll be to your great satisfaction realizing how much you learned after a week or so. And then new motivation is born: I can’t lose what I have just gained. I don’t want to waste my invested time. I must go on.
- One needs tons of strong will.
- Yes. One does.
- Where did you get it from?
- From the joy that I was making progress and getting closer to my goals. In case of Spanish it was my voyage to Chile and then an extra opportunity of making money teaching the language. Other languages we can talk about on another occasion.
- Have you got any more advice concerning the matter?
- Yes, I have. But for the additional advice I’d charge a fee. It’s my job. Anyway, it’s enough of preaching for today. The point is not to discourage you from getting down to work.
- It doesn’t look too promising.
- Don’t make me angry. The worst thing is that everybody else praises you for your English. They claim that you do well in English but I know that your English should have been much better long ago.
- Why do you care?
- First of all, for the same reasons as you do. Secondly, because we often meet foreigners and I feel bad as an interpreter when the level of conversation exceeds your knowledge of English.
- Don’t bully me.
- I’m only exerting so called positive motivation pressure.
