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Polish Language - Basic concepts [52]
You might have noticed that I have seldom mentioned gender or feminine, masculine or neuter nouns. The reason is that the they're not at all important.
While I agree that it's completely useless to learn abstract case endings, I wouldn't say that learning the gender of the noun is "not at all important". You would test it if you tried to utter a phrase that employs a numeral in it. Try to complete the following phrases (here I"m testing your working knowledge of Polish) using the numeral "two" in them: Widziałem
...... mężczyzn; widziałem
........ kobiety, please notice that both these nouns end in -a.
More important than that is that knowing the gender of a noun is indispensable when you start to use it with a verb or an adjective as it determines which ending of the verb or of the adjective you should use.
because 99% of the time, the final letter determines the pattern. No Polish person really thinks of "lampa" as being somehow womanly or feminine. It's a lamp for heaven's sake. It just ends in "a" and other words that refer to it must also end in "a". That's it.
I have been neglecting the gender of the noun when learning French and I'm in linguistic trouble because of that. To memorize it now I think of the French nouns in terms of being somewhat feminine or masculine as the gender of a French noun often does not match the gender of a Polish one. And although the Polish person doesn't think of "lampa" as being humanly feminine, they certainly think of it as being gramatically feminine; this is - I suppose - done by the fact that the intention to use the noun lampa triggers in the brain the readiness to use potentially associated words as, for example, the determiners as
ta,
tamta or adjectives ending in -a etc. This process should certainly occur in the minds of the native speakers of Polish, otherwise we wouldn't be able to use correctly nouns like mężczyzn
a, cieśl
a, koleg
a, poet
a (nouns of masculine gender, but ending in -a).