He learned to speak Polish only at theater school. “The dialect was spoken at home”

Piotr Polk is one of the best Polish actors today. However, he did not have an easy start in his profession. When he entered the Łódź Film School, he obviously knew Polish, but he did not yet speak it as freely as everyone who had spoken it since childhood. Polk was born in Silesia and Silesian and German were his main languages.

Piotr Polk had to learn Polish from scratch

Childhood spent in Silesia meant for the future actor he could speak Silesian or German fluently. These languages ​​were spoken at home, and it was only at school that Polk had constant contact with the Polish language. Even when he was a child, he fulfilled himself artistically at a music school, but his real dream was a theater school. For this he had to prove his flawless knowledge of Polish. “To get into acting school, I had to learn Polish,” he recalled in an interview with “Viva!”.

I had two foreign languages ​​at school: Russian and Polish. At home, the dialect and German were usually spoken. At the cinema, I learned not only English, but also proper Polish. Now, when I remember myself from those years, I admire this boy. For his courage and diligence – he said in an interview with Interia.

As with any foreign language, learning it was not easy. Diction, fluency, rooting the language in everyday use – all this had to be practiced, and where other students used Polish naturally and only honed their skills, Piotr Polk had yet to acquire the ability to use Polish as a tool.

I learned to speak Polish, I wanted to reduce the accent as much as possible, but not to get rid of Silesianness, but because the language is the actor’s basic tool. I can play a Silesian in a Silesian film or theater, but I can also speak beautiful poetry in Polish – he said in an interview for “Śląskie Nasze Miasto” in 2011.

My entire family spoke the Silesian dialect. I guess I’m the only one in this family who decided to learn Polish fluently. Learn it, because yes, I treat this language as learned. (…) Years later, I asked Jan Machulski why he accepted me for his year, since I was so far from perfect in the sense of a candidate for an actor because of who I was, as I said. And he replied that it was because “you were different, but you were yourself.” (…) I never renounced my roots, I never became ashamed of where I came from, what I looked like, what language I spoke, I felt that this was my value – he explained in an interview with the first program of Polish Radio.