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.

read all »

These are probably the most important verbs in any language: to be and to have, or, in Polish: być and mieć. It’s good to memorize their conjugation in the very beginning of your studies, especially since być is an irregular verb! Here they are, conjugated in the present tense:

read all »

Today we’ll look at some of the uses of the third case, the dative. Its main purpose is to serve as an indirect object, that is to indicate someone or something who’s a beneficiary of your action. It also appears in constructions with some certain verbs and prepositions.

As an indirect object – when someone is a beneficiary of your action

Czytam dziecku książkę.
I’m reading a book to the child.
Opowiadam historię kobiecie.
I’m telling the story to the woman.
Daję kotu tabletkę.
I’m giving a pill to the cat.
Sprzedaję narkotyki małym dzieciom.
I sell drugs to small children.

read all »

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

read all »

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!

read all »