Share Perfective and Imperfective Polish verbs

Cześć, Krzysztof!

Dziękuję, 'dokonane' przeciwko 'niedokonanymi' czasownikami jest trudną sprawą we wszsystkich językach słowiańskich. Czasowniki ruchu są nieletnie a potrzebuje się codziennie ćwicić.

thanx a lot for your help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:)

I have this book called "301 Polish verbs" it is great and shows 301 verbs in future ,past ,present ,perfective and inperfective :)

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Perfective vs Imperfective

I'm a starter in polish learning and when it comes to looking for some verb in the dictionary there are usually several options. As I've been told it correspondes to the imperfective and perfective forms of the verb.

What is the diference between them? And give me some examples please!

yeah, rather a difficult task for a beginner :(
check the section Polish Grammar & Pronunciation - there's been a thread about it quite recently [in this thread - Admin].

Heh heh, my favourite perfective/imperfective verb pairs are the ones that bear no resemblence to each other at all, at least not to my non-polish senses,

for example:
kłaść (imp) włożyć (pf) = to put.
brać, wziąć

go polish, go :) gives us something to study....

hey, we're not that bad :)
sometimes there's not much resemblence to each other in English verbs as well

be -was/were - been
go - went - gone

or even those:
teach - taught - taught
think - thought - thought
catch - caught - caught

Krzysztof,

In English, the verb "work" can also have as the supine tense "wrought" for "worked". Many think that "wrought" is the perfect form of "wreak", as in "to wreak havoc" = to cause destruction. The former though is highly antiquated and almost elevated usage, hardly advisable for foreigners.

This may be a misnomer. Will have to check Wiki. on that one!

Ah, but i'm used to the English verbs, lol

Włożyć - wkładać (To put on)
Zdjąć - zdejmować (To take off)

These unsimilar perfective/imperfective verbs are melting my brain!
There are so many of them...

mine too (drip....drip...... LOL!!): brać/wziąć = perf./impf. 'to take'
potrafić/móc = perf./impf. 'to be able to, can
pójść/chodzić = perf./impf. 'to go'/'come'
umrzeć/zamierzeć = perf./impf. 'to die'
etc.
What's worse, those buggers tend to be fairly common verbs!!!!

Powodzenia,

And you can have perfective future and perfective past (but not present as it's a done thing)

Iść - to go is a wonderful verb in all it's shapes.

potrafić / móc are simply 2 different verbs (with sometimes similar meaning), both imperfective.
pójść / chodzić, actually the perf./impf. pair is pójść / iść.
chodzić = "to walk" or "to go" (but in the meaning of "to frequent" - chodzić do szkoły, do pracy etc.)

umrzeć/ umierać = perf./impf. 'to die'
(no such word as zamierzeć, only zamierzać = to intend)

Cześć, Krzysztof!

Dzięki. Tak, 'umierać' jest innym czasownikem za parę 'umrzeć'/'umierać'. Zapomniałem!! - - :)

Also zamierać/zamrzeć meaning to decay.

Michał, such verbs are often even trickier for foreigners, since they seem so much alike (...but, of course, aren't!!), whereas the other ones mentioned are easier to detect as different forms of the same idea, therefore are easier to distinguish, e.g. the paired verbs 'brać' vs. 'wziąć' for English single verb 'to take'.

The German Language too is full of words very similar to each other but with very different meanings.

malen/mahlen (identical pronunciation: the first meaning 'to paint', the second 'to grind'

Lachen lachen (the first plural form with a long a, meaning 'puddles', the second with a short a, meaning 'to laugh'

......the list goes on and on, true enough, Michał

Its one of the reasons why I could never 'get my head around' German at all.

U r Russian, right Michał?

Well, have to use process of elimination here. right ?
He /she is not English.
He/she is definitely not Polish.

He/she is probably Russian based on past posts and the views and comments contained in said past postings.

We assume Michal is a 'he' or is he a 'she' ?

Wonder if he was in the KGB lol.

It is true there isn't much love lost between Russians and Polish people.
And if Michal is anything to go by Russian people are not very good at Polish grammar :(

Greg will disagree with u, he's 'bum' buddies with a few Vladimir's I think. He seems to think that most Russians like Poles and vice-versa. Deluded perhaps?

Michał, this is one the alleged reasons for the fallacious argument used by speakers of supposedly 'difficult' languages which seems to run along the lines that because English is 'so much easier', in this case than German, all German speakers know excellent English since the latter is not as 'hard' as German, thereby making the need for knowing German superfluous.

What b_ _ _ _ _ _t, people! Just because someone spends years and years in school learning something, does this necessarily equate with competence??
I studied math (as compulsory here in the States as English abroad) from 9 until 14, and am today still poor at it. Would I ever say that a person needn't bother to learn math because everybody of my generation had to learn it in school?? If someone can do something much better that I can, by all means then, be my guest!

I'll admit too, German, like Polish, has its challenges, as I've said by now countless times in this forum.

What does this mean? I have been told that the German education system is not very good. Having said that, I have met Germans who have attended school and seem to speak excellent English. Is this proof of an excellent education system or does it just prove that English is an easy language for Germans to pick up? Is Polish grammar difficult for Russians to pick up? I would have thought that Russian was far harder for Poles to master because of the varying stress patterns and the way pronunciation changes in any given word. In this regard at least, polish is quite logical.

beetroot? lol

lets play hangman :)

Is it 'bloody twit'?

Surely Russians would quite logically have an easier time learning Polish than Americans, Brits or French, for example.

English is of course linguistically closer to German than Polish, however, precisely because English is sooooo much more omnipresent in daily life than Polish,Russian or almost any other tongue I can think of, it tends to seem as though it were a sort of "everymans' " language, to be fractured and mutilated at will.

Noone seems to mind when, say Germans or whoever, butcher the English language. Yet, if we English native speakers make audible mistakes in pronunciation or grammar, many Germans almost immediately try switching to English (after all, language switching is practically the same as code switching!), whereupon the Germans' English is usually not all that much better than the Yank's German. The difference is merely in the cache

and status associated with speaking English, nowadays, more often US-English.

Obviously, Polish, for example, is a useless language for daily social or business activity.

not if you live in Poland. or UK.

Useless?? Why is Polish a useless language when dealing with Poland, especially since we've already established in this very forum that Poland has become an even more significant country/economy thanks to the euro currency?

What other language are we going to use when dealing with Poland? For that matter, what other language other than German is used when doing serious business with Germany, Russian with Russia, English with North America etc....?

Remember: The most important language in the world is the language the customer speaks!

Clearly he meant on an international scale....of course when dealing with Poles it is a very useful language :)

If you spoke English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic there are not many places you could not communicate....Polish has a limited value unless you are dealing with Poland or Chicago.