I Tell People I Speak Five Languages. One of Them Is a Lie.

Four years, a Polish girlfriend, and one uncomfortable admission about why language learning really fails

Photo by Michelle Tresemer on Unsplash

It has been four years, and I still can’t hold a decent conversation in Polish.

Yet whenever someone asks how many languages I speak, I say “five, but I’m still working on my Polish.”

It started in 2022, when I was looking for a job to extend my residence permit in Europe.

I found a teaching position in a small town called Oława.

The pay was laughable, but the offer included something no other job had: a work and residence permit, accommodation, and, in my boss’s exact words, “lots of fun and development.”

He wasn’t wrong. Poland surprised me completely.

The people, the traditions, the food, the landscapes. And the language: fast, unfamiliar, unlike anything in the other four languages I speak.

From the moment I heard my colleagues talking across the office, it felt like an open invitation.

I decided to learn Polish. You never know when a language might come in useful.

That was four years ago.

What makes this stranger is that my circumstances for learning Polish are nearly ideal.

• My girlfriend is Polish.
• I have spent some time living and working in Poland.
• Her family constantly invites me to every gathering, every dinner, every holiday.
• They ask me questions po polsku, correct my pronunciation (cz — sz) when I get it wrong.
• Laugh when I use a word completely out of context
• Keep speaking Polish to me even when we share another language.

They want me to learn. They make space for it every time I visit.

And I still can’t hold a conversation.

[embed]Want to Know Why You Forget Vocabulary So Quickly? You probably don’t need another app, course, or textbookmedium.com

There’s something else worth saying. In France, you try to speak French and they switch to English. In Germany, the same thing happens.

In Poland, something different occurs: people slow down, lean in, and encourage you to keep going.

If immersion is what language learning requires, I have had more of it in Polish than in any language I’ve ever learned.

So why hasn’t it worked?

I am back in Poland this summer, sitting at another family/friends dinner where the conversation moved around me in a language I can´t follow, I finally stopped blaming the language.

Polish is difficult. The grammar is genuinely complex. But that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that I had never actually done the work.

I had tried methods. I had downloaded apps. I had read about approaches used by experienced language learners and told myself I would implement them.

What I had not done was sit down, consistently, day after day, and study the language.

After leaving Poland the first time, I moved through two more countries using three different languages.

Polish was never one of them. Without pressure, without stakes, without a daily reason to open a notebook, I let it slide, and kept sliding, for four years.

[embed]The Most Powerful Language Learning Skill Nobody Talks About How focusing on listening first can transform the way you learn, understand, and speak a foreign languagemedium.com

I came across a line recently that got me thinking: “Know what you want, make a move toward what you want, observe what your move accomplished, repeat.”

That’s it. That’s the whole process. And I hadn’t been doing any of it.

No method replaces the decision to actually show up. The most expensive course, the most qualified teacher, the best immersion environment in the world, none of it functions without the person behind it choosing, every day, to do the work. I had every advantage a language learner could want. I just hadn’t used them.

Take this with you:

• Perfect conditions don’t produce results. Consistent action does.
• Immersion only works if you’re actively trying inside it; passive exposure without engagement is just background noise.
• If a method isn’t working, before blaming the method, honestly ask how consistently you have actually applied it.
• Accountability starts and ends with you. No book, teacher, or environment can want it on your behalf.

If you’re learning a language and feeling stuck, I want to ask you one question before you look for a new method: how many days this week did you actually study?

Happy learning, and this time, I mean that for myself too.

With my articles, I guide through the world of language learning.

So follow me, give 50 claps or **buy me a coffee **to keep learning together.