01/12/2026
It was one of my best friends Kostek’s birthdays a few days ago, I want to acknowledge how much he inspired me along the way while we studied Fine Art together.
By starting to teach me Polish in 2008 while we studied at the Ruskin together (Fine Art department) at Oxford, he fed my fascination with the Polish language, which sowed seeds for me to reimagine how to teach Cantonese through the ways Polish spell their intricate nuances in variational consonant clusters, such as the consecutive fricatives and affricates like szcz-, cześc, rzeczpospolita Polska etc. These seeds were among many experiences in my life from as early as learning Tagalog songs 2-3 years old, that led to the eureka-chain I had in 2015 when I was casually teaching a Portuguese Brazilian friend some Cantonese. From the pressure to facilitate him to pronounce accurate Cantonese phrases for the dating context within half an hour, I realised I needed to visualise the language and reference familiar existing systems of tone such as solfeggio, and Polish had been a major inspiration for me to ‘re-spell’ Cantonese sounds with zero regard for conventional romanisation which I deemed ineffective, confusing and misleading (ie beginners find tone hard enough, and can’t think about numbers in addition to the sounds and tones in the language, and Jyutping spelling is non-intuitive for English speakers). In less than a year I discovered that the same system could be used to transcribe the world’s languages, which is what I’m researching now at the Canadian institute of linguistics. Up til that point I spoke words and phrases in about 10 languages but since the system developed I’ve transcribed words and phrases in almost 40 languages, including Chinese dialects and indigenous languages such as Cree and Haisla. I’ve hosted parties and given speeches in languages I never learned, using my visual transcription system that Kostek had a part in inspiring. People we have an affinity with can be ideal language resource teachers and we were instant friends since we met during the interviews. So grateful for all the ways we spent time together and inspired each other, always welcoming me and friends to visit him in Poland and so we did!!! The longest I think was 2-4weeks Easter 2009, I think up to 4 times before he left, showing me many places from within Warsaw to Łodz, Zakopane, Krakow, and Oświęcim . 💝🌅🙏♾️
If you’re interested in how the language project is going so far, I did this talk at my school last summer, you can watch it at 1.75x speed:
https://youtu.be/dCaJyyd7a7k
This talk summarises my 10 years of teaching and artistic experimentation before I entered linguistic academia, which I was putting off because I wanted to see how far I could go on my own ideas before I might get ‘brainwashed’ by academia and lose all my creativity! 😜 8 months into my MA studies so far, I would say I am benefitting from learning from all who have come before me and been passionate about languages 😄. My dream is to use a visual interface and multiple creative tools to facilitate multilingualism and language revitalisation. Kostek’s heart and creative spirit has definitely been a guiding light!
Thanks for reading 🥰🙏🌅 will update you guys when I manage to make progress! 🙂
Thank you to all the students, professors, teachers, friends and family who have supported me and been an influence on my life whether knowingly or not this was just something I wrote highlighting the impact of my learning of Polish on my journey so far!
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