Bits of Polish

Or, the most intimidating part of the Polish sound system. Seriously, even writing about them – and I’ve been able to pronounce them for years, so I pretty much take them for granted – feels intimidating.

So let’s all face them and get intimidated.

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CH – chodnik, chemia
pavement, chemistry

In modern standard Polish, ch is pronounced identically to h. It obviously makes the pronunciation aspect easier while messing up the simplicity of the spelling at the same time… For most Polish schoolkids, learning when to use ch and h is a painful process involving hours of writing mind-bogglingly boring dictations. The same goes for rz and ż, and for u and ó.

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Why not start your week with enriching your Polish vocabulary with a handful of interesting expressions? I’ve chosen a couple of common idioms containing names of birds, so that at the same time you can learn what some birds are called.

niebieski ptak – a blue bird
A careless, irresponsible bum who idles around instead of getting some useful work done, like all decent people do.

z lotu ptaka – from a bird’s flight
From a bird’s eye view, from above.

pisać / bazgrać jak kura pazurem – to write / scribble like a hen with its claw
A not-so-nice way of commenting on someone’s calligraphy. Because hens aren’t known for their hand- (claw?) writing skills.

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There are millions of people in the world who are perfectly comfortable with referring to a table as "he" and a carrot as "she." Polish speakers belong to this group. We pretty much take it for granted – I can’t recall I’ve ever pondered over what exactly makes a carrot feminine… Even though you kind of might expect it to be masculine, considering its shape, and who knows? Maybe in some other gender-distinguishing language it is masculine. It’s entirely possible, since grammatical gender is usually assigned arbitrarily, apart from the clear-cut cases of people, when it follows their natural gender — though it’s easy to lose faith in humanity after discovering that German girls are, grammatically, neuter.

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After you’ve got familiar with the cardinal numbers, it’s time to learn some ordinal numbers. Note that Polish ordinal numbers behave pretty much like adjectives – it means that they have to be inflected so that they agree with the noun they are assigned to. If the noun is masculine, you use the masculine form of the numeral; if it’s feminine – the feminine form; if it’s neuter – the neuter form. If you’re familiar with how adjectives create these gender forms, you shouldn’t have problems with ordinal numbers, as they follow the same pattern. The masculine form is the basic one – the one listed in a dictionary. The feminine ending is –a, and the neuter one is –e. Look at these examples:

1st – m. pierwszy – f. pierwsza – n. pierwsze
3rd – m. trzeci – f. trzecia – n. trzecie
10th – m. dziesiąty – f. dziesiąta – n. dziesiąte

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As we saw in the previous post, small words can be problematic and ambiguous – and at the same time interesting! Today we’ll have a look at another one – czy. It has more than one use, and because it fulfills important functions, it’s very common and you can see it in different contexts. Let’s start with what I think is the easiest – and most imporant – one.

Yes/no questions

Transforming statement into yes/no questions is a piece of cake. You take your sentence, stick a czy in the beginning, a question mark in the end and you’re done. No troublesome changes in the word order, weird auxilary verbs and other nightmares of English learners!

Ta książka jest bardzo droga.
This book is very expensive.

Czy ta książka jest bardzo droga?
Is this book very expensive?

Anna lubi wszystkie koty.
Anna likes all cats.

Czy Anna lubi wszystkie koty?
Does Anna like all cats?

Twoje dzieci jedzą dużo czekolady.
Your children eat a lot of chocolate.

Czy twoje dzieci jedzą dużo czekolady?
Do your children eat a lot of chocolate?

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