Throughout the semester I found the implementation of language partner interaction into this course to be extremely helpful as a motivational tool. Without an accountability partner that tested my progress in my target language on a weekly basis I know that I would have fallen prey to the procrastination that I am naturally prone to. The language partner meetings also served to bolster my desire to learn by reminding me on a weekly basis of the unique and interesting characteristics of the Polish culture that had inspired me to study it in the first place. Throughout the semester, my language partner and I experimented with different theories and tools to determine how it was that I learned language the best and each approach met with varying amounts of success. Although our initial attempts to teach me the necessary topics and phrases that I would be tested upon in the course through memorization were successful, they did not successfully lead me to any understanding of the language as a whole and I was completely unable to understand any of what was said in polish if the vocabulary that was spoken was outside of that limited to the specific topics I had chosen to study. As a result, we next approached the language from a grammatical angle and through the learning of the most basic grammatical structures of Polish I became able to form my desired thoughts into speech, albeit in extremely broken speech, but in vocabulary that was independent from my topics of interest. However, although this approach yielded success in self expression, it did little to allow me to express complex thoughts or understand spoken Polish. To address these issues, my language partner exposed me to as much spoken and written polish as possible in the form of listening to polish songs, reading polish children's books, and watching her interact with other native polish speakers via skype and phone conversations. As a result, my vocabulary slowly improved and I began to be able to identify certain phrases in heard Polish by markers such as common intonation gestures. Although this methodology was extremely successful in expanding the nature of my polish skills even farther beyond that which was required to speak about my topics of interest and increasing my vocabulary, it was a gruelingly slow process and did not progress as far as I would have liked it to before the conclusion of the semester. Unfortunately the downside to this method of learning Polish is that I became too familiar with my language partner's particular "lived in America for 8 years" polish accent which she also slowed down for me so that I could better understand. As a result, when I was presented with another native polish speaker in my oral evaluation, I found her mannerisms in speaking and her accent much harder to understand.
Although my language partner and I experienced much success, my only regret is that she did not have more time in her schedule to meet more than twice a week as I believe that this occurrence would have improved my language learning greatly since learning on my own without a native speaker to confer with was often extremely frustrating and unsuccessful since it led both to incorrect learning and the positive reinforcement of incorrect speech for days before it would be noticed and then re-taught. I believe that occurrences such as this wasted precious time in my attempt to learn an entire language in a single semester.
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