Slavic Speedrun: I Took Speed Every Day for Two Weeks to Master the Polish Language

I was robbed of my birthright of learning my father’s native tongue of Polish. When he settled in Australia at age four, he was forced to learn English via Sesame Street and a set of encyclopaedias my Babcia won on a game show in the 60s, all the while having Polish beaten out of him for fear of being called a “wog”. 

Polish is notoriously challenging and has been rated by Babbel as the third-most difficult language to learn. Aside from the complex grammar structures – more complex than Latin – the words look and sound insane. The word for happiness, for example, is szczęście, which, written phonetically is something like shch-en-shch-ye.  

People’s names are equally intimidating – try saying Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz five times.

At age 26, unemployed, broke and bored, I decided it was time to take up my ancestral quest. Having great familiarity and success with amphetamine sulphate, aka speed, during many exam seasons, my guess is a two-week crash course should do it. 

Do not try this at home, but if you do, you’ll need a notebook, a Polish exercise book (be it physical or digital), a computer, speed dial and, ideally, sticky notes. 

My strategy is to indulge early – I have a healthy bump with my morning coffee – then I immediately start power-reading through my exercise book, writing each new word in my notebook as I munch a banana.

As I start I encounter mężczyzna, the humble Polish word for man. Sounding it out as mez-kuzy-zna, I quickly realise my English perception of the Latin alphabet will no longer cut it. 

So for all those who didn’t heed my earlier warning, I present a highly simplified native English speaker's cheat sheet for Polish:

• c = ts
• ch = h
• cz, ć, ci = ch
• zs, ź, ż, zi, = zh
• sz, ś, si, prz, brz = sh
• dz = j
• j = y
• Ł = w
• w = v
• u, ó = uh
• y = i

Another bump with lunch clears my vision and I power through to new heights of understanding. By the evening I’ve made dozens of sticky notes with Polish words on the back and English words on the front, and as I stare at them proudly I realise I haven’t eaten since the morning ‘nana. 

I stick the notes up on a wall and go through them the next morning, marking whatever I struggle to remember with green stars. 

For the next few days I get up early, make a delicious coffee (*sniff*) which goes down nicely - and get to work.

I’m focussing on the basics: pronouns and conjugations. I, you, he/she/they, we, you (plural), they (plural). 

What are they and how do I use them? Much the same as English, verbs come in different forms depending on the subject, eg. I am, You/They are, He/She is. It’s something so seamless to a native speaker that we tend to forget it’s there. 

Unfortunately, with Polish, that means learning them all anew, so best to grind them down while the speed is fresh. 

In tandem, I decide to try an amphetamine-fuelled Duolingo session and chew through a whole unit in a day – a habit I keep up for the next week. (Some units are slower than others so beware Unit 5. It’s a grammar grind, and no amount of stimulants will change that.)

In addition to Polish, my knowledge of speed is advancing quickly. One healthy bump after breakfast, one with lunch, and an afternoon top-up seems to be the best recipe. That should keep anyone sharp, but feel free to adjust responsibly as necessary. Take great care in not overdoing it – speed is very moreish and a single bump can send you from ultra-focused to impossibly distracted.

At this point, I run into how Polish approaches gender – there are masculine, feminine and neuter/neutral here – and start getting headaches, which (luckily) I can solve with our small, white friend.

The headaches feel very akin to those lack-of-caffeine morning drains I’m used to, so I’m not sure whether to blame the speed or general abuse of my brain.

With my morning sniff my eyes sharpen to the page and all that troubled me melts away once more.

I wake each day to an edge around me that shivers until the deed is done. As the days blur together I find my key – blackening with grime – which I’m stacking ever so slightly higher each morning like some imperceptible joke my nostrils are in on. 

I cannot overstate the importance of eating. Speed is a HYPER appetite suppressant and your body will start to wither if you don’t give it what it needs. Whatever you normally eat, I’d add another half. And while you’re at it, get yourself a store of Magnesium and Zinc tablets to replace whatever speed’s sucking out of your body. I’m not sure they actually do anything, but it seems to help.

The whole week muddles in an adrenaline craze of suffixes and suffering and each night I topple onto the pillow exhausted. 

As I learn my thirtieth permutation of “this”, my brain begins to feel loose. 

I use day 12 to take a break from the powder for want of sanity. Instead, I’m engulfed by a horrible depression – some infinite cold hidden in my dripping posture, drawing me ever downwards towards the hollow baggy. Better get back to business. 

As I near the end of my studies, the prolonged effects of stimulant abuse become evident. 

It can be dangerous because it’s now much like a good cup of coffee. There’s no great drop, no moment of transcendent revelation, I just feel a slight boost after which the whole world's that little bit brighter. 

I have more energy, more empathy and the good in the world is easier to find. 

Considering there’s no hangover and you can sleep fine if you work your brain enough, it seems like the best damn drug there is. 

The problem with speed, though, is that after ten days or so you start to feel like your limbs are thinning such that there’s a lag in movement. At the same time, they’re taught and sharp, like a rusty bear trap forgotten on the forest floor, ever lying in wait to snap. 

It’s a cruel drug because of its subtlety. In its moderate effects must lie some hidden truth of health, but alas. Somewhere between habituation and sobriety lies humble moderation, in which I believe lives a healthy and sustainable vice like any other we’ve already adopted, but that slope is slippery, folks. Sobriety is easier than moderation. 

I meet my friend Alex for a five-minute conversation in Polish over coffee. Here we go. 

We chat about family, where they’re from, book/film preferences, interests and the weather, in what I’m sure was stuttered and grammatically abhorrent Polish. And yet, to everyone’s surprise, we are able to communicate. 

She says she’s impressed by what I learnt in two weeks, though that I need to work on my genders.

I truly feel like I’ve absorbed an immense amount of Polish but I’m still slow to respond in speech, as if my words have no lungs. 

Much of the time I have to ask her to repeat the question slowly or rephrase, and had it been a regular conversation with someone less familiar I’m sure they would have insisted we switch to English.

But having been stuck in my room for two weeks, who knows how much of that is poor Polish versus developed social ineptitude. Still, I’m impressed with what I’ve accomplished. According to my exercise book, in two weeks I’ve landed between an A2 and B1 level – verging on intermediate proficiency.   

And could I have done it without the speed? Absolutely not. 

How much of a second language can one learn in two high weeks? A whole damn lot, it turns out.

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