{"id":4286,"date":"2015-08-20T16:41:33","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T15:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/?p=4286"},"modified":"2015-08-20T16:41:33","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T15:41:33","slug":"going-back-to-my-roots-to-learn-polish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/going-back-to-my-roots-to-learn-polish\/","title":{"rendered":"Going back to my roots to learn Polish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alex Koszykowska is the newest member of the EuroTalk team, joining us last month as our new sales and marketing assistant. In today’s post she explains why she’s learning Polish.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/a>
My grandma, dad, sister and me. I’m the little one!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is said\u00a0that a million people in the UK class Poland as their ancestral home in some way.\u00a0This is the case for my\u00a0family; my Granddad came to England from Poland during the second world war (my Gran also came\u00a0over to\u00a0England but from Russia – she and my Granddad met when she was a nurse in the army). Over\u00a0the years my Gran has adapted to my Granddad’s ways,\u00a0and will now only speak Polish or very\u00a0basic\u00a0English to us. Growing up, my dad and his brothers were all brought up speaking Polish as their main language, with English as their second. Even today they can slip into Polish very naturally – leaving my sister and I completely oblivious to what was going on around us.\u00a0My mum and aunties all learnt to speak Polish – mainly to get brownie points from my Gran; but really it is only my sister, my cousins and I who cannot speak Polish in our family.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0means\u00a0regularly at our\u00a0family\u2019s favourite restaurant (which of course is\u00a0owned by a Polish family), we would be pretending to understand what everyone was talking about.Whenever we entered\u00a0the hotel,\u00a0I\u00a0would always greet the family\u00a0with \u2018Cze\u015b\u0107<\/em>\u2019 (hi). My sister and I have also mastered how to say \u2018Dziekuje ci bardzo<\/em>\u2019, which means \u2018thank you very much\u2019 (and rolls off\u00a0the tongue much more easily then you think it would).\u00a0We have managed to get away with this throughout our childhood. However, now I feel a certain responsibility to carry on this tradition in our family. Working for\u00a0EuroTalk\u00a0has shown me that language learning isn\u2019t as intimidating as many people make out.<\/p>\n

\"Katarzynki,<\/a>Part of the reason it is so enjoyable to be learning Polish is that\u00a0I love everything about my Polish roots. From\u00a0the tradition of whenever we go to my Gran’s she hands us a pack of\u00a0Katarzynki\u00a0(which are like soft biscuits with a ginger flavour in the middle and chocolate around the outside) to our rather impossible to say, spell and write surname (with a lot of people finding the change from \u2018a\u2019 if you\u2019re female to \u2018i’ if you\u2019re male\u00a0for the last letter of our\u00a0surname confusing!).<\/p>\n

The four words I\u00a0do know (five if you include\u00a0dobrze<\/em>\u00a0– ok) make my Gran so happy; she loves seeing us take an interest in our Granddad’s language.\u00a0Even basic language skills are so important and can make a huge difference.\u00a0My family heritage is my motivation to learn more Polish, which\u00a0is why the\u00a0uTalk\u00a0app is so fabulous, as\u00a0it is designed so you can learn how to say key phrases. For example \u2018prosz\u0119\u00a0m\u00f3wi\u0107\u00a0wolniej<\/em>\u2019, meaning \u2018please speak more slowly\u2019, which\u00a0is vital to know in my family!<\/p>\n

Are you interested in learning a language, or do you have family members who are bilingual and you’re keen to join them? Try our uTalk app<\/a> to get started!<\/p>\n

Alex<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Koszykowska is the newest member of the EuroTalk team, joining us last month as our new sales and marketing assistant. In today’s post she explains why she’s learning Polish. It is said\u00a0that a million people in the UK class Poland as their ancestral home in some way.\u00a0This is the case for my\u00a0family; my Granddad … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,1279,794],"tags":[46,176,1277,91,2,1278,251,1280],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}