Bits of Polish

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.

So, if you don’t speak any gender-distinguishing language, you’ll probably need time to get used to calling a carrot a "she." And you’d better put some effort into that; being able to determine the gender of a noun is absolutely crucial to producing grammatically correct Polish sentences. Why? Because other parts of speech that modify the noun can take different forms depending on the gender. Compare:

Ten budynek jest wysoki.
This building (m) is tall.

Ta wieża jest wysoka.
This tower (f.) is tall.

To drzewo jest wysokie.
This tree (n.) is tall.

As you can see, even such a small, innocent word as this changes its form depending on the gender of the noun it points to. Not to mention the different adjective endings!

Are you already looking forward to memorizing dozens of Polish words with their completely arbitrary genders? I hope so. In fact, this task is much less daunting than it appears, since it’s easy to guess the word’s gender looking at how it’s built. Well, easy for native speakers at least, but there are some rules you can learn, and soon you’ll start picking up the patterns.

Let’s start with the

Feminine gender

If a noun ends in –a, it’s most probably (though not always!) femine:

kobieta – woman
marchewka – carrot
torba – bag
szkoła – school
mąka – flour
nadzieja – hope

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that only words ending in –a are feminine. There’s a couple of feminine nouns ending in consonants:

krew – blood
brew – eyebrow
sól – salt
moc – power
noc – night
oś – axis
północ – midnight
twarz – face
Bydgoszcz – a town in Poland
podróż – travel
miłość – love
radość – happiness
nienawiść – hate
przyjaźń – friendship
pleśń – mould
łódź – boat

…and many more. As you can see, many of them end in particular consonant clusters, such as –ść, -źń or –śń. Getting used to such patterns will make it easier for you to remember the gender, but it’s better to avoid relying on them all the time – for example, while krew and brew are feminine, lew (lion) is masculine. Sól is feminine, but ból (pain) is masculine. Oś is feminine, but łoś (moose) is masculine…

So it’s a lot of fun. How do native speakers handle this? They rely on how the word is inflected. For example, the fact that the genitive singular of krew is krwi indicates that it’s a feminine word. Lew, a masculine noun, becomes lwa. Obviously, without a native intuition to lead you, you can’t rely on this knowledge, so you’ll have to memorize at least a handful of those atypical nouns.

Remember how I said not all nouns ending in –a are feminine? That’s a good moment to have a look at the

Masculine gender

The situation is similar here – there’s a general rule and some interesting exceptions.

If a noun ends in a consonant, it’s most probably (though not always, as you’ve already seen) masculine:

stół – table
kamień – stone
widelec – fork
pies – dog
dom – house
grzyb – mushroom
chłopiec – boy

A rule wouldn’t be a rule without exceptions, right? Have a look at those masculine nouns:

mężczyzna – man, adult male
poeta – poet
artysta – artist
dentysta – dentist
sędzia – judge
kolega – colleague
doradca – advisor
spadkobierca – inheritor
idiota – idiot

They all end in –a and have something in common: they refer to males. Poeta is a male poet, and his female counterpart is poetka. Artysta is male, but artystka is female. Doradca and spadkobierca are male, but doradczyni and spadkobierczyni are female. Kolega is male, but koleżanka is female… Just so that you don’t think transforming these nouns is easy and straightforward ;)

If you’ve already come to terms with how mężczyzna, despite being an indisputably masculine noun, has the same ending as feminine nouns, you can have a look at the last class:

Neuter gender

No nasty surprises here, fortunately – not many, at least. If a noun ends in a vowel other than –a – that is, –o, –e or –ę, it’s neuter:

krzesło – chair
mięso – meat
dziecko – child
jedzenie – food
słońce – sun
morze – sea
imię – name
źrebię – foal
ramię – shoulder

There’s a couple of nouns that don’t conform to this pattern: some Latin borrowings ending in –um. They’re neuter as well:

muzeum – museum
forum – forum
liceum – high school.

You can read more about them here.

If you’ve made it so far,

you should have a rather clear picture of how to distinguish noun genders in Polish. With this knowledge, you can happily start pointing to things and referring to them as either on (he), ona (she) or ono (it). You also know which form of the pronoun this to use: ten (m.), ta (f.), or to (n.).

Is there anything else you need to know? Actually, yes. So far we’ve only been concerned with singular forms of nouns. In the plural, however, things get a bit more complicated: suddenly, you have to use a completely different pronoun to refer to these men and these tables, for example – but we’ll have a look at that some other time!