Hello there, I’m Aleks.

I’ve been learning English for God knows how many years, and I came up with an idea to share my English learning experiences. This is going to be a proper journal, covering more than ten years of my life and filled with stuff that might be interesting for you language freaks. These days I use English every day, mostly watching YouTube and reading books; I’ve never used it in a professional environment. This is also me not using any dictionaries etc., so that both you and I can see how proficient I was able to get through my long (often chaotic and absent-minded) language journey. Let's begin then!

It all began in elementary school at the age of seven. I actually remember learning the alphabet pretty well, and I remember how unfathomable the idea of a foreign language seemed to me at the time. Initially I thought you just have to learn to pronounce letters in a different manner and you’re good to go, or maybe that it was like a cypher – don’t ask me how it was supposed to work, some kids are dumb. My hypothesis crumbled, when teacher taught us the word ‘and’ (‘i’ in Polish). I just wasn’t able to explain it away – it was too absurd for seven-year old me that this most simple word should consist of three letters!

Anyway, we were going through color names, animals, simple songs and even grammar – the amount of it became too problematic. More diligent classmates rushed through exercises, while the rest of us wasn’t able to grasp the point of doing them. I also remember I had private classes of English until the age of nine with three different teachers – all of this effort went to learning the most basic stuff like ‘to be’ conjugations, saying ‘I’m eight years old’ instead of ‘I’ve got eight years’, putting an article before a noun (articles being non-existent in Polish ofc), differentiating present simple and present continuous, or figuring out why certain sentences put ‘there is/there are’ at the beginning. Through private classes I got pretty good in school English, although the notion of real-life communication was still beyond imagination. I clearly remember I had this thought: ‘OK, it’s fun to pretend “wąż” is “snake” and “biec” is “run”, but are there really people out there speaking like that all the time?’

Learning English turned out to be interesting at times though. Even when I was a kid, English was ubiquitous in my surroundings and I was proud, when I managed to observe that some seemingly Polish expression is a loanword. Obvious examples include ‘OK’ and ‘sorry’ (this one we pronounce in a very Polish way). I was able to analyze some words like ‘weekend’ (also spelled ‘łikend’ in Polish), which actually just meant ‘end of the week’; in this case I even asked my grandpa, what word for ‘weekend’ was used when he had been young and – as I’ve found out – there had been none (they had six-day working weeks, so they were simply saying ‘Sunday’). They expression that baffled me most was ‘Star Wars’ (pol. ‘Gwiezdne Wojny’). Both of these words are nouns, ‘star’ being an adjective-like modifier to ‘wars’ – such grammar makes no sense to Polish kids – a word has to be either noun or adjective! Moreover, ‘wars’ is plural, so – according to Polish people – its modifier has to agree in number. Had George Lucas given me an opportunity to rename his franchise at the time, it would have ended up as ‘Starry Wars’ (still no way to satisfy my second objection).

This wraps up my story for today; I’m age ten and I’ve managed to get into the ‘advanced’ English group at school. I hope I haven’t missed anything up to this point, however these are old memories, they might have become a bit convoluted. I believe my next entry will be more interesting – I’m going to tell you about my first interactions with native English content like music, videogames and such. You know, these days I tend to think the English in my head is quite wonderful, but putting in ‘on paper’ here before actual proficient readers is a way to humble myself, so to speak. I hope you enjoyed the read, until next time!