Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

strategic Polish

I am about to go file my directed study application for Polish, which has gotten me thinking about strategic study of Polish this term, my last, probably.

We are supposedly going to converse more this term, which is good. But to be able to deal with that, I'm going to have to work on listening/speaking during the week. The (self-critical) question occurred to me the other morning: why would I expect to get better at listening/understanding when I never do it? Studying written grammar improves only understanding written grammar.

Also, I really want to build useful vocabulary, above and beyond the relatively artificial vocab presented in the textbook. My first step will be to download and format the Polish text from the Nowa Huta promotional website, and start to work on a translation. It would also be good to find some geographical materials and begin to learn the vocabulary of planning and geography.

In other news - the usual first-week flurry of meetings and tasks. It's discouraging because my time is so fragmented that I feel I'm already not meeting my self-expectations about dissertation work. But then again, this week is an anomaly, and I hope that next week will be more "normal" and that I will begin to have the fairly large blocks of uninterrupted time to work on research that I have been planning for.

It is beginning to snow. I'm looking forward to walking across the bridge and campus.