“Uff,” I panted as I finally reached the top of the castle tower, sweat running down my face. I could feel the burn on my legs, and I was excited – we hadn’t met or heard anyone else while ascending the medieval red brick tower. After a day of being swarmed by other tourists, we hoped we’d have the top of the tower to ourselves. Wrong – as soon as we reached the top, there was another woman there: An employee. “Dzien dobry,” I addressed her. “Dzien dobry,” she replied, followed by a slew of Polish that I couldn’t understand. “Nie mówię dobrze po polsku” – “I don’t speak good polish” I quickly replied, expecting the conversation to switch English. “Nie mówię po angielsku” – “I don’t speak English” she countered. A feeling of dread dawned on me. There we were – the three of us, alone at the top of the castle tower. I could sense that she was desperate for someone to talk to. My sister was with us but spoke even less Polish than I did. Panic gripped me; the woman spoke again: “Skąd jesteś?” – “Where are you from?”

Flash back to 3 weeks ago: I’d finally booked our tickets to Poland. My sister was coming to visit soon. I was told that everyone under 30 would speak English well. Why should I bother learning polish? I always want to try though. I’ve experienced this before – going to a country only for a week or two, but wanting to try to engage people in their own language. I’d failed every single time before – Korean, Romanian, Japanese (I had some small successes there, but not much!). This time I’d try something different! For the two weeks before I go on this trip, I’d study as much Polish as I possibly could. My tactic would be different too. I pledged that I would speak for one hour each day with a live Polish native speaker.

I sat down, logged into Italki, pulled up some tutors, and booked my first few lessons. Then the anxiety set in.

How could I even begin to learn speak a language without knowing much? Well, the easiest fallback is to learn how to do it while you’re doing it. The first thing to learn: “how do you say?” From there you can keep going: “How do you say ‘hello’?”; “How do you say ‘I am from Canada’?”; “How do you say ‘I live in Germany’?”

I thought I’d give myself a bit of a headstart. But how? I don’t have any Polish books available, and I’m not going to buy one for just two weeks of study. Also I mostly care about getting around and having conversations. I don’t want to do exercises or learn grammar. That’s easier to learn later, once you understand some phrases well.

After a bit of searching around, I found an interesting YouTube series called “Easy Polish” (which exists for other languages as well). Each episode consists of native speakers being asked interesting questions. It’s unscripted and impromptu, yielding a solid few minutes of natural conversations.

I started by watching the first few episodes, then rewatched them, looking for phrases and snippets that I would find useful. Things such as “I don’t understand”; “Really?”; “I’m sorry.” I extracted 33 of these into my Spaced Repetition System (anki), including accompanying audio snippets. I then began studying these. I did this for about 2-3 days before my first lesson. This meant that going into the lesson I could already say a handful of somewhat random, but useful, phrases.

Then I had that first lesson.

It was tough, exhilarating, painful. But I did it! We talked for an hour, with me trying to use as much Polish as I could. I quickly mastered the phrases “How do you say … in Polish?”; “Can you say that again?”; “Could you write that?”; “I don’t understand.”

But repetition is really the key to learning. In order to commit what I’d learned and used to long term memory, I recorded each lesson, with permission, and then converted the audio to mp3, and uploaded it to my phone. Then I could go for a walk and re-live the lesson again. I found this extremely effective, because you have context and emotion (stress, excitement), the phrases you hear and speak during the lesson are more easily absorbed, especially when compared to going through a list of vocabulary that someone else has chosen for you (i.e. every text book ever).

Additionally, I sat down and meticulously reviewed some lessons, extracting phrases I wanted to commit to long term memory, adding them to Anki, along with an audio snippet of my tutor. This is very effective, but incredibly time consuming, so I didn’t do it to each lesson.

I repeated this daily. Because of the tight deadline, I increased the amount of new cards I learned on Anki from 20 to 30. On average, from a single lesson, I pulled out about 40-60 new phrases, so it would take a few days before I had learned all the cards.

By the fourth or fifth day, I had well over a hundred cards that I’d learned and it became impossible to keep up with it. The first few repetitions of a card using Anki take immense mental energy, and that combined with speaking for an hour, left me beginning to feel tired. At no point after day three up until a week after I got back from Poland was the amount of cards I had left to review at zero.

I still tried though.

I also briefly toyed with Duolingo. I only used it when I was tired, had no pending Anki reviews (so only during the first few days), and didn’t feel like doing something I considered more useful. I did several lessons, and about the only thing I could recall from the entire thing is “chleb” (bread). It’s an unnatural learning environment, and you’re learning what the course designers want you to, not vocabulary that is relevant to you, and certainly not vocabulary that you already have a context for.

There were two days that I didn’t have a lesson – one day I had to cancel, and the other my tutor cancelled. I made up for it by having two lessons the following day. About 3/4 through my second lesson on that day, which would’ve been my 8th or 9th lesson, my brain hit a wall. It was like a switch. It didn’t want to do this anymore, even though I could feel myself able to have basic conversations. But I found it extremely hard to continue. I just wrapped up the lesson early and chatted a bit in English. It was okay – I’d spoken for 1 hour and 45 minutes in Polish that day.

I realised that I was rapidly burning out, but I promised myself I’d speak every day. I decided to scale it back a bit – I cared less about Anki, which took a lot of energy. I would mostly spend my time reviewing previous lessons, without exerting myself too much; just enjoying the process. Then if I had some energy left after my session with the tutor, I could do some Anki then.

The lessons focused purely on conversation. I let the conversations occur naturally, meaning we talked about things interesting to us. Topics such as: Where are we from; where have we travelled; why I’m going to Poland; what we will see there; what languages we speak; and what are our interests. Music came up often too.

I did not review every lesson. Given that I couldn’t keep up with my Anki cards, I didn’t go through them thoroughly anymore. I would simply load the audio onto my phone and listen to them while going for a walk. I was effectively building my own Pimsleur-like library. This relistening of lessons made the Anki cards easier to review in the end.

After the two weeks were up, my sister arrived here in Berlin. The day she arrived and the day after, I took a break from studying. The only activity I did was to listen to a bit of a lesson while I was on the train to meet her at the airport.

Then off we went! Poznań ho!

Eventually we made our way to the castle of Malbork, in northern Poland. Together we climbed the countless stairs to the top of the red brick tower, where we were greeted by that lonely employee who desperately wanted to chat, and as she said, didn’t speak any English.

Well, somehow I muddled through a very basic conversation with her, almost entirely in Polish. I learned that she also spoke Russian, grew up in the area, and was able to recommend that we go to some other nearby towns. I told her we’re from Canada, that we were siblings, and places we had been. The whole time it felt like I was drowning, but somehow I made it through. I was even able to end the conversation gracefully, telling her I would like to take some photos while we were up here.

That was the highlight of my Polish language experience, but it was also very useful elsewhere. We met a few people under 30 who didn’t speak any English at all. I was able to order food (and ask whether vegan food was available), and Poles were absolutely delighted when I spoke to them in their own tongue. Some of them were astonished when I said certain phrases (“nie ma problemu”) with confidence and a certain level of fluency. It was also immensely easier to get around. Navigating the trams and trains became a lot easier, as did encounters in shops.

In the end, I learned way more than I expected I could. It was intense, and I felt like I was pushing my limits, but it was an extremely rewarding experience. The entire thing cost me about USD$100, for 14 Italki lessons with four different tutors. On average, I studied about 4-5 hours a day, even while working full time. I did less during the weekdays, but more on the weekends. I feel like if I could keep this up, I would be able to have impressive conversations within a few months.

I’m not sure it’s the most efficient though. Next time I’d try one lesson a week, but break that lesson down into Anki phrases and relisten to it multiple times before my next lesson. Thus I would take that one lesson and try to master it, before learning more things in the following lessons. I would be doing less, but still doing something every single day. If the motivation were there, then I could do more. That said, speaking every day was nice, if intense. At one point I even dreamt slightly in Polish, and the sounds of my tutors from the recordings were swimming through my head constantly.

It was definitely more exciting and fun than sitting in a dull classroom, speaking one sentence every 10 minutes to the teacher, who is speaking slowly back to you so that you can understand. It significantly raised my confidence and my motivation levels. That alone might count for a lot of success.