When it comes to exploring the wonderful world of Polish cases, you have to find your way around two broad areas: how to decline the words – which boils down to memorizing the appropriate tables – and, more importantly, when to use which case. This is not always straightforward; for example, even if you know from other languages that the genitive expresses possesion, and that the accusative marks the direct object, you’ll still find Polish abounding with surprises. Certain verbs and prepositions take certain cases for no apparent reason (unless you have a PhD in the history of slavic languages, but then you’re not reading this – hopefully), so you’ll just have to suck it up.

That’s why I’ve decided to embark on this little quest to describe the use of cases. We’ll start today by looking at the genitive.

Units of measure

kawałek chleba
a piece of bread
butelka wody
a bottle of water
pół roku
half a year

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Despite the fact that Polish can inflect pretty much everything – and nouns if nothing else enjoy a particular richness of declination options – there are groups of nouns that behave rather unusually. Today we’ll have a look on one of them – nouns that only decline in the plural. Yes, that’s right – the words in today’s list don’t change their form in the singular, no matter the case you fancy to use them in.

What do these words have in common? For one thing, they’re easy to recognize because of their –um ending. Even though the list isn’t comprehensive, you shouldn’t have problems recognizing new words of this type when you see them.

Secondly, all of them follow the same easy pattern for building the nominative plural form: the ending changes from –um to –a. Here’s how the other case forms are created, on the example of the word liceum – high school.

Nom. licea
Gen. liceów
Dat. liceom
Acc. licea
Ins. liceami
Loc. liceach
Voc. licea!

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The words magnes and magnez are pronounced identically, with an [s] at the end. The reason for this – if you care, naturally – is a phenomenon known as devoicing (or, for those of you who would like to enrich their vocabulary with some a little longer words – ubezdźwięcznienie). It affects voiced consonants when they occur right next to an unvoiced consonant or at the end of the word.

Because these two words are homophones, they often get confused in writing, even by native speakers (even though the sheer number of Poles who regularly show an admirable creativity in misspelling and generally abusing their native language is enough to make one’s head spin). You can be better than them, of course, and learn to tell these words apart:

magnes – magnet

Magnes przyciąga metalowe obiekty.
A magnet draws metal objects.
Magnes nie przyciąga kotów, jeśli nie są one z metalu.
A magnet doesn’t draw cats if they aren’t metal.
Kocimiętka to magnes na koty.
Catnip is a magnet for cats.

magnez – magnesium

Magnez to pierwiastek chemiczny.
Magnesium is a chemical element.
Czekolada to bogate i smaczne źródło magnezu.
Chocolate is a rich and tasty source of magnesium.
Czy twój kot ma odpowiednią ilość magnezu w diecie?
Does your cat have an appropriate amount of magnesium in his diet?

Being able to state that things exist, and that they are located in various points in space, is one of the basic abilities you will want to acquire learning a language. English is pretty straightforward in this respect. “There’s a newspaper on the table,” you’d say, eager to translate it into Polish, and vaguely tense at the same time, since you already expect it can’t be easy. In fact, you would be really surprised if it was.

Well, it is. Kind of. Almost. There are only two things you have to remember about.

The verb

Where English uses the verb “to be” in such constructions, Polish prefers verbs that actually have a “real” meaning – ones that say something about the subject’s position in space. You can use “to be”, of course, but there will almost always be some alternative that actually sounds more natural. For example:

Na stole jest gazeta.
There is a newspaper on the table.
A grammatically correct, meaningful sentence, but it sounds like there’s something… weird with it.
Na stole leży gazeta.
There *lies* a newspaper on the table.
What a native speaker would say. read all »