About Me — Poly Leo:
The Article That Took Me the Longest to Write
My first 1,000 followers are here, so it’s time to introduce myself properly. Thank you for every single Follow!
Thank you so much!
There are 1,000 of you now, and I mean it. I started this blog at the end of December 2025, and here we are.
Surprisingly, this draft ended up taking me the longest to write. Telling the story of everything that happened over 30 years of my life — losing two homes in Mariupol and near Donetsk, becoming homeless, and rethinking my entire life — turned out to be far from an easy decision.
And telling it all without turning it into a whole book, while still making sure I included what truly mattered, was another difficult task.
The younger generation now calls the story of a person’s life “lore.” That word once belonged to fantasy novels and RPGs, and now it covers anyone with a childhood and a few questionable decisions. I play a lot of RPGs, so I accept it.
Here’s my lore.
You know me as Poly Leo, short for polyglot Eleonora. I’m a philologist by education and a foreign language teacher by profession. I’ve been teaching Polish for over 8 years and speak Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and English. Years of studying how languages work have taught me to look beyond textbooks and grammar rules — and that’s exactly what I bring to my teaching, my AI experiments, every prompt I share, and the mentoring I offer my clients to help them build a learning system that works for their target language, goals, and everyday lives.
Where I’m from
I’m from Donetsk (and Mariupol), and I lost my home twice. I won’t dwell on that here, but in recent years, the word “displaced person” has described me better than anything else, and it makes you quickly re-evaluate your relationship with material things. I once wrote about leaving with only a few items, and one of them was a water flosser, which says a lot about my priorities.
My first English teacher was a computer game, one of the discs my dad brought home. It had no lesson plan, no progress tracker, and absolutely no interest in being beginner-friendly, so if I wanted to understand what was happening, I had to figure it out myself. So, if you’ve ever wondered who destroys the world of Morrowind without paying any attention to the plot, that was me — a little schoolgirl named Eleonora.
Now that you know a little more about me, let me tell you about my simple mission:
Language learning should fit any budget.
The “tomorrow” years
I spent years preparing to start my life. I read books about productivity, collected advice, and waited for the magical day when I’d finally feel ready. Tomorrow has a terrible attendance record, and my calendar says it’s still pending.
Eventually I realized that preparation can become procrastination.
When I finally started, I taught Polish for a year and a half to a group of students who wanted to move to Poland, and I did it for free. I already had 5 years of tutoring behind me, and I taught them simply because I wanted to.
It’s pretty weird, isn’t it? But I’d say it’s the Christian thing to do.
I also once charged a private student less for an hour than most people spend on coffee, so apparently I believed in the value of education and was still working up to the value of my own.
Some of my students got into Polish universities, others moved for work, and some improved their Polish while already living in Poland. My favorites started with me not knowing the alphabet and now read articles about football and Formula 1 and hold their own in conversations about complex topics, with no strain and no exhausting study sessions. I promise a clear system, honest advice, and a high tolerance for mistakes.
Fluency in 3 months is marketing talk, so I leave it out.
Experience has never once arrived without mistakes, and along the way I worked at a city council, a charity foundation, a university admissions office, and a scientific library, always with real, sometimes very upset people.
That gave me one rule: I never judge anyone for mistakes.
A bigger classroom
Since 2023, I’ve been exploring AI.
I started by experimenting with my own English, then brought AI into my students’ homework. Now I’m sharing the best of what I’ve learned with anyone who wants to learn smarter.
One thing became clear: a thousand tools can sit on your phone while you still don’t know how to learn. You can download every language app on the planet and freeze when someone asks you a simple question.
That’s the gap I want to close.
Some people claim AI will replace tutors, and others say it’s useless.
I’m here to show you how to learn languages with joy, which is how my own English got its biggest upgrade.
I wanted a bigger classroom than one student at a time, so now it’s the whole internet.
Whether you live in America, Thailand, Indonesia, or anywhere else, you can take the best of what I know and use it to change your life, because languages change lives.
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In my articles, I share how to write better prompts, use different AI tools, and turn language practice into a role-playing game that pulls you in like a good book. It works for English, French, Spanish, or any other language.
My honest résumé
You deserve to know who gives you advice, so here’s my résumé, both pages of it. But I’ll keep it short enough that you won’t get bored and close the tab.
Page one holds my green flags, and I promise to keep a straight face.
- Discipline. Every weekend I write for Medium, whatever the weather or my mood.
- Planning. I jot content ideas into my notes daily, and the app has become a museum of things I was absolutely going to do.
- A working method. I teach RAC: Role, Action, Context, a way to write your own prompts.
- No judgment. Mistakes are welcome here.
Page two is the one HR never asks for: my red flags.
I’m a bore, and officially it’s my biggest flaw. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’m also the kind of person who actually emails a website to ask them to fix a category name instead of just laughing, closing the tab, and moving on.
I’m stubborn, gloriously so.
I doomscroll. I tell myself I’m searching for blog ideas, then notice an hour has gone by while I laughed at videos I won’t remember.
I’m hopeless at math. Claude once gave me a list of 20 items. I counted twice, got a different number each time, and suspected it was cheating me, and the third count confirmed there were 20. Measuring my apartment sounds far too complicated, so hand me a book on palatalization instead.
I’m a tutor with a bad memory. I speak four languages, but if you ask me what I came into the room for, we’ll both have to wait. Everything goes into Google Calendar and reminders in my notes.
I also have a small toddler at home, so when people ask how I do it all, the answer is that I don’t. What you see here comes from many small, planned steps taken between snacks, naps, and one very loud opinion about socks.
Things I love
I love games (Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 are my top three) and sport: the gym 2 times a week, plus Pilates and stretching 3 more times. Some weeks I hit the plan, and some weeks the plan hits me.
Why I share it all for free
I write here for everyone, with no monetization on this platform, and the reason is my own story. I’ve been poor, and I was an especially poor student who weighed 42 kilograms. I saw that learning can be free, and today the problem is too much information and too little time, so most learners feel chaos in their heads. I give away everything you need to learn a language without the rush.
You won’t get empty promises from me. I know what I’m talking about, and I stay human with everyone who comes to me.
Even while studying to become a philologist, I made mistakes you’ve probably made too:
- I learned words without context, straight from dictionaries.
- I never reviewed a word after learning it.
- I opened Shakespeare and Dracula at my A2 level.
- I opened grammar textbooks hoping they would make me fluent.
Those mistakes eventually shaped the way I teach today. I want learners to practice words in context and use language in situations they might actually face. That’s also why I started building Prompt & Speak resources: to turn good intentions into something you can open, use, and repeat, which leaves less time wondering what to study and more time using the language. If you want to go further, I also offer help through language mentoring.
If you’re curious about learning with AI, start with my free guides and practical language-learning resources. If you’d rather skip the trial and error, you’ll also find ready-to-use prompts and structured practice materials through my profile. Pick what fits your budget, your level, and the time you actually have, and skip the imaginary three-hour study sessions.
You’ve probably met “experts” who sell a digital product made in a week. I spent every day since 2024 building, refining, and checking mine, and I presented it only recently. A quality product built on experience takes far longer than a week.
And a word to you, dear reader
Learning languages today feels like walking into a shopping mall without a map: you came for one hoodie and left with 40 flashcard apps, 3 grammar books, and a sense of dread (absolutely exhausted!).
If you’re learning English, French, Spanish, German, or another language, I’d be happy to help.
Years of studying philology and different language families have taught me how to adapt learning methods and structures across languages.
Maybe one day I’ll figure out languages with completely different writing systems too. But for now, I know my way around Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages — and how to learn them on your own, without relying on a tutor for every step.
I’m here to help you find your way through that chaos.
If you have a question that keeps bothering you, write to me. I read every message and every comment, and your question may well turn into my next article.
I believe that if you’re determined to learn a language, we can overcome any obstacle together. As I remember from my very first year of studying Latin: Per aspera ad astra — through hardships to the stars.
Thank you for taking the time to get to know me a little better. Now you know who’s behind Poly Leo. ❤️
See you in the next article.
