How I ended up writing a language book

The inspiration

The story of how I came to write a language book is quite interesting, as it begins with a romantic motive rather than an educational one. I was teaching my wife Polish and I could tell how quickly she was overwhelmed with the many weird and unfamiliar aspects of Polish. Afterall, Polish is not an easy language, but that can’t be the only reason for her struggles. 

Recent statistics in regard to Spanish speakers learning Polish showed that more than 70% quit after only a couple of classes. The easy explanation is that Polish is a difficult, almost impossible language. But that explanation is too simple. There has to be a more concrete reason for such a low success rate to learning Polish.

That led me to do a little analysis and I realized that Polish is not taught in the most approachable way. But in fact, students are overwhelmed with a great many different rules and aspects that confuse instead of welcoming a new learner to the language. If I were to teach English and I began by reading Shakespeare, most students wouldn’t understand anything. And Polish shouldn’t be any different. Yet, that seems to be the standard way to teach Polish, not by easing into the language, learning step-by-step, but by throwing one into water hoping they learn to swim back to shore on their own. 

Polish, like any language, has patterns, and the only truly comprehensible way to learn the language is to understand and recognize the patterns that make Polish, well, Polish.

So before I set out writing this book, I had to know where I am going with the book and where the reader will go while reading the book. Where do I start and where do I want to finish? And how does the reader follow along? Writing a language textbook is different from writing a novel, for example. I was not writing a story nor was I writing a non-fiction book about a particular topic. It is a textbook. Yet it still requires a creative process.

It was less about writing, but more about identifying what are the crucial take-aways that are important for a new learner of Polish – what are the language patterns that I want to show and let the reader digest for themselves. First, you want to teach the essentials, the alphabet. Then you want to introduce vocabulary. But what happens quickly is you want, well you need, a reader to pick up on differences between grammatical gender, plurals and singulars, verbs and conjugated verbs, and so on. So I chose every chapter topic by assigning a specific task: on the first page of the chapter the reader doesn’t know this, by the end of the chapter the reader will understand this aspect of the Polish language. And so the book builds chapter by chapter. One step at a time. Not to overwhelm, but also not to oversimplify. 

Guiapol goals

An important goal of making the textbook was to ensure that students can follow step-by-step, and that they come away feeling that, in fact, they have increased their ability. So for every exercise created or any example written, I had to always make sure that the words I used were taught previously. I never wanted to surprise the reader. Therefore, I often had to ask myself, does this sentence make sense? I mean it is a correct sentence, but would someone that has only read 80 pages of this book be able to understand and translate this exercise? Such types of questions were those that I always had to keep in mind every moment that I was writing this book.

I wanted the textbook to be capable of imparting a sense of accomplishment to the reader. This is where the idea of short stories came about. The goal is to be able to understand the story after having practiced the previous pages. These short stories increment in difficulty as the reader progresses, while acting like a litmus test of the level the reader has. The goal of which is to highlight that Polish is not as difficult as may seem at first, the short stories I wrote are meant to give the sensation that one's understanding gets better.

Writing a textbook was a different experience than I could imagine it would be. I was writing to educate, it is not a story with a hero’s quest or an exposition essay. It is a book where I take a reader on a journey to discover a new language. Every chapter I demonstrate an interesting albeit important aspect of a new language to the reader. Sometimes this lesson can be quite easy, sometimes it will be more difficult, yet if the readers follow the steps they will step towards a better understanding of a completely new language. The goal was always to make a difficult, alien language appear possible to learn. If any reader of the Guiapol series can feel a little bit closer to mastering Polish without ever wanting to give up, I can say it was a success.

Konrad Joseph Migacz - Guiapol writer

Accounts and books links: https://linktr.ee/guiapol.official

Presentation of Guiapol's first book (Latinas en Polonia Event)