24 Godziny Projekt

Polish Language Sample, The Language Museum, Accessed May 2023

 Welcome to the first action project of the spring senior humanities course Endurance. Endurance is the last humanities course of my time at GCE, and this is the first of two action projects I will be doing for it. In Endurance, my classmates and I have been learning about difficult circumstances that people in history have endured and overcome. Initially we were focusing on things like Arctic exploration and ways to make plans and stick to them like in the 2013 documentary "Maidentrip". We have recently been spending time learning about the history of the Holocaust. We did this by reading Elie Weisel's memoir "Night", watching the movie "Schindler's List". We also did some of our own online research that we shared with the class in presentations, and will soon be going to the Holocaust Museum to learn more. Our only big Field Experience so far was with the DePaul University Labor Education Center. Representatives from the LEC came to run a collective bargaining simulation with my class and the junior class. We had the opportunity to learn from their experiences with labor organizing which was one of my favorite moments of the course so far. To wrap up the first unit, my classmates and I each completed a project that was supposed to be 24 hours of the same thing. The project intends to be a way for us to stretch ourselves to commit to a long term goal. I chose to do 24 hours of Polish on Duolingo. I have been spending a lot of time in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn recently which has a strong Polish presence. The alphabet of the Polish language is the same as English, but I noticed when I saw Polish language signs I typically had no clue how they would be pronounced. Polish is a Slavic language like Russian, so it seems especially different as compared to French or Spanish, which are closer to English evolutionarily. I didn't go into this project expecting to learn a language in 24 hours, so I set my goal as being able to sound out most Polish words I see by the end of things. While I only hit 20 hours, I was still able to meet this goal. I also have had a good time with Duolingo and am planning on continuing to use it for Polish which I am excited about. You can watch my process below.