But the accession of former Eastern Bloc countries to the EU has had a seismic impact on the numbers of people taking an interest in the culture and language of these states.

Peterborough College of Adult Education has introduced a regular class in Polish to meet this demand, and when I visited the college to have a look, market development manager Jackie Hall told me that the course has become increasingly popular.

"There are a variety of reasons why people want to learn Polish," she said.

"It can be because they want to travel and want to speak to local people, but it can also be because of work or family reasons."

One of the students in my class – Lynn – has a Polish partner, and so is taking evening classes to learn more about both the language and the culture of the country.

Jackie told me about doctors and nurses who have learned some of the language to better help patients, and a number of people who work alongside Poles in their jobs who decide to learn some of the language.

"I think people enjoying learning as much about the culture as they do about the language," Jackie said.

My teacher for the evening was Magdalena Czarneck, who has studied languages in her native Poland, France and Britain.

Does she think Polish – a Slavic language which has very different origins from our own – is difficult to learn?

"That's a hard question, because every language has its difficulties," she said.

"Some people think English is an easy language to learn, but there are lots of phrasal verbs, which can be hard – Polish has difficult pronunciation . . . it has sounds that don't exist in English."

The first phrase Magdalena had me learn was "dzien dobry", which means "good day", and already the pronunciation was proving a touch on the tricky side. Magdalena also has a policy of speaking as little English as possible, so as the lesson developed, I was really being kept on my toes as I tried to get to grips with the new language.

I always found languages a bit of a chore in school, but being an enthusiastic adult in a class of enthusiastic adults felt very different from my days as a self-conscious teenager. Some things will always remain, however. It will surely come as little surprise that the lesson focused on buying something in a shop.

Language teaching has definitely moved on from when I was in school, though – many of the exercises took the form of mercifully non-patronising games, which had the effect of committing vocab and sentence construction to memory.

I'd had good fun learning some Polish for the evening, and while still a long way off being able to hold a conversation, I could easily see the appeal of this kind of very satisfying kind of self-improvement.