Polish Language - Basic concepts

Polish has the reputation for being a terribly odd and difficult language, and some Poles love emphasising the fact as though it were a badge of honour. If you get your head around a few concepts, though, it's not that bad.

Some parts of Polish are not that difficult. For example, there are just two ways of conjugating verbs - past and nonpast, and one is based on the other. And while it can be difficult to pick the right case ending, the meanings of the cases themselves map quite nicely onto English. So here is my attempt to demystify this Eastern European language for those who have been tearing their hair out trying to get their heads around it. While I can't do anything about the historical sound changes that have made some aspects of Polish quite irregular, there are a few things that are overcomplicated by grammarians that at heart are quite simple.

DECLENSION
This is the strangest part of the language for Western Europeans, so I reckon it should come first. Now, if you're lucky enough to be familiar with Finnish, Turkish, Hungarian or Japanese, you'll know that instead of using prepositions ('in', 'at', 'to'), these languages use postpositions and tack these concepts on to the end of the word as a suffix. Polish is a hybrid, and sometimes uses case endings instead of prepositions, whereas at other times it combines both: with a pen is długopisem in Polish, next to the pen is obok długopisu.

Admittedly, knowing which ending to use can be a bit of a pain, but if you know just a few words, you'll be able to decline most others by analogy well enough. Don't waste your time staring at conjugation tables. Instead, think, "Oh, okay. So if a word ends in 'o', I swap it for an 'a'". Noun endings might be a bit of a headache, but compared to Spanish or Italian, which have lots of different endings for different tenses, there are only two major verb conjugations - the past and the nonpast, and the past is based on the nonpast conjugation of "to be", so they're actually very similar. You win some, you lose some.

Polish also likes to have adjectives agree with the nouns they modify. If you know anything about digital broadcasting communications technology, you might have heard of something called Forward Error Correction. It's essentially the practice of adding some redundant information to data, so that if some of it gets lost on the way through a noisy channel, the receiver can still work out the original. Adding case suffixes to all modifying words is a natural, linguistic form of FEC, so if someone says "tymi ostrymi nożami" (with these sharp knives) on a noisy bus, and the listener only hears, "tym* *stry** *oża*i," his brain will most likely, with good accuracy, be able to work out what was said. Similarly, if someone says, "czarna koza" (black goat) and the listener hears "czarna ko**", he should be able to guess that what the speaker meant was "czarna koza" and not "czarny kot". That's what all the gender and case agreement craziness is about. And it's quite clever if you think about why it's there. What this also means is that you can do crazy things with word order in poetry (or even in conversation), and still have things make perfect sense.

The cases are as follows:

Nominative
This is the dictionary form and it indicates the subject of the sentence. English indicates the subject of a sentence by putting it before the verb. Polish is flexible in this regard, but it quite likes to use English word order too.


Genitive
This is the possessive form, and it indicates the owner of an object. English either uses the suffix 's' or the word 'of' to indicate possession.


The typical singular endings for this case are -a, -y and -i.
In plurals, words ending in a vowel lose it, and other words take the suffix -ów.

Instrumental
This indicates what you used to carry out an action. English uses the words 'with' or 'using' in place of the instrumental.


The typical singular endings for this case are -em and -ą.
The plural ending is almost always -ami.

Accusative
This indicates the direct object of an action. English indicates direct objects by putting them after the verb.


If the word ends with 'a' then the ending changes to -ę.

Otherwise, the accusative is identical to the nominative, except if you're talking about a person, where it's identical to the genitive.

Animals are a hybrid of a 'thing' and a 'person' in Polish, and behave like people in the singular and as things in the plural.

Dative
This indicates the indirect object of an action. It corresponds closely with the English word "to".


Sometimes English swallows the "to" and swaps the word order, so the above could also be "She wrote Jan a letter".

The typical endings for this case are -owi, -u, -i and -ie.
The plural ending is always -om.

Locative
This indicates the position of an object, and must occur with a preposition.


Saying na stół is not wrong, but it has a different meaning. It means onto the table, as combining some prepositions with the accusative indicates movement to a particular location.

The typical endings for this case are -ie and -u.
The plural ending is almost always -ach.

Vocative
This is the form used to address something directly. English has an archaic vocative particle, 'O', which you may be familiar with from old religiously themed texts, as in, "O Lord."


The vocative is usually mandatory, especially in formal language. The only time it seems to be optional is colloquially, and only with people's names. "Cześć, Janek" and "Cześć, Janku" (Hi, Janek) are equivalent, though some people might prefer one form over the other, and many use both.

The endings are typically the same as the locative for words ending in a consonant. In other cases, if a word ends in 'e' or 'o', it stays the same. Only if a word ends in 'a' or 'ia', does it change to 'o' or 'iu'.

The plural is the same as the nominative.

VERB CONJUGATION
How verbs work will be quite easy for you to grasp if you're a speaker of Spanish or Italian.

Basically, the verb ending determines the subject of the action. What this means is that Polish encodes an English phrase such as "you will give" into one word, and for this particular phrase, that word is "dasz."

The dictionary form of the verb is called the infinitive, and it almost always ends in "-ć". "dać", for example, means "to give". "Chcę dać" means "I want to give".

The verb endings are almost identical for all verbs. Here is the non-past conjugation:

The ending for 'I' is 'ę' or 'm':


The ending for 'you' is 'sz', with the sole exception of 'jesteś' (you are):


The ending for 'he/she/it' is nothing at all:


The ending for 'we' is 'my',


The ending for 'you (plural)' is 'cie',


The ending for 'they' is 'ą':


So, "I will give" is "dam" and "he will give" is "da".

While the endings remain the same for all verbs, strange things can happen in the middle of the word, and irregular verbs can be a pain in the backside. But, just like your Mum might have corrected you as a child when you said "I bringed" instead of "I brought", she understood you fine, and there's a good chance that even if you don't know the proper form of a word, you will be understood fine (and then corrected) by a Polish speaker.

The conjugation of być - to be (jestem, jesteś, jest, jesteśmy, jesteście, są) uses a slightly different set of endings, but, lucky you, they're the same as those used for the past conjugation.

To get to the past, you tack on 'ł' if the subject is masculine, 'ła' if the subject is feminine, 'ło' if the subject is neuter, 'li' if the subject is plural, and 'ły' if is plural and not masculine. That's it. You already know the "he/she/it/they" forms.

Now, Old Polish used to form the past tense for "I did" by saying something like, "jestem robił" or "robił jestem" (literally "did I am"), but now, it's simplified a bit by only tacking on the ending of "jestem" to the end of "robił". So if you need the form for a different subject, you add whatever the być ending would be for that person.

For example:

robiły - they (female) were doing
jesteśmy - we are
robiłyśmy - we (female) were doing

It might seem a lot to do on the fly, but if you know how to say, "I am", "you are", "he is", then there's very little you actually have to learn. And to make it quicker, rote learning the endings might be easier, especially now, since you know where they come from.

TENSES
There are five tenses. How is that possible, since there are only two conjugations - the past and the nonpast?

Well, there are usually two forms of each verb. The perfective and imperfective. The imperfective of "to do" is "robić" and literally means "to be doing". The perfective of "to do" is "zrobić" and literally means just that, "to do". Generally speaking, the perfective form is just the same word, but with a prefix of some sort.

So if you use the nonpast conjugation on an imperfective verb, you get the present. If you use it on a perfective verb, you get the future.

robię - I am doing, I do, I have been doing
zrobię - I will do, I am going to do

And the past:

robiłem - I was doing, I used to do, I had been doing
zrobiłem - I did, I have done, I had done

And the fifth tense?

będę robił - I will be doing

In fact, Polish permits you to say "będę robić" too. The infinitive version is a little easier, but it comes with a few caveats. First of all, it doesn't work for all verbs. You can't use it in place of "będę mógł", for example. And fellas might sound a little effeminate saying "będę mieć" instead of "będę miał" because the infinitive form is usually just used as an abbreviation of "będę miała." As a rule of thumb, if you use the infinitive shorthand, use it to abbreviate long words, and not when you're referring to yourself.

That's it for now.

OP, thank you for posting that. You have mentioned similar in other posts of yours, and it is interesting and appreciated to see a fuller lesson, as it were. I have printed it out!

Wow! We get more later?:)
I'm really happy you started this thread, am sure i'm not alone on here in struggling to get my head round this language.

Nice that you're dedicated enough to want to help us all:):)

To kcharlie
--------------------------
Sir, in your most interesting overview of the Polish grammar, you seem to "reduce", and thus to underestimate strongly the role of the genitive case in Polish in aspects other than rendering relations of possessiveness between objects. Its other roles should not be neglected as the genitive case truly seems to be the most important one in Polish, greatly exceeding the importance of each other case.


Please notice that the genitive case is indispensable in the formation of the majority of negative sentences. For instance, having employed the accusative in a phrase like: Kupiłem sobie nowy płaszcz, you should irrevocably turn to the genetive case while formulating the negation of this sentence: Nie kupiłem sobie nowego płaszcza. Also notice that a significant number of Polish verbs require the genitive case rather than the accusative case for their direct objects despite the fact that the genitive case does not carry any notion of possessivness there. Thus, the sentence: "Ustąpiłem mu miejsca", needs the noun in genetive, though it is true, however, that a number of the native speakers of Polish have the tendency to replace the genitive with the accusative with such verbs, but this tendency is hardly prevailing yet.

Such observations have perhaps led the ancient Polish grammarians to call this case by the name which has nothing to do to with the notion of possessivness, but underlines the notion of completness, or more often, the lack of completness with it. Its Polish name "Dopełniacz" is of course translated into English as "Genitive"; and since the latter so clearly conveys the idea of possessivness, at the same time being the only visible "case" in English, it is easy to associate the Polish genitive with the sole idea of possessiveness in the mind of an Anglo-Saxon learner of Polish. In my opinion, however, it should strongly be avoided, hence these few remarks on the role of the genitive in the Polish system of cases with which I allow myself to supplement your otherwise interesting description of them all.

Yup, there's more coming up. I'm really glad someone has found this useful.


That was just an introduction. I did in fact notice that I forgot to say that the direct object is put in the genitive case in negative sentences, but thanks for pointing that out. My point was that the use of cases is actually quite logical, and that people needn't be afraid of them. And you have a very good point - the genitive is by far the most important case. In fact, I wrote a bit more about verbs and intend to post about that soon, but I also intend on writing more about declension after I cover verbs.

And, before I start writing about declension again, I went through about a minute of a Polish pop song to get an idea of what cases are used most frequently in typical, casual language. Nominative, the dictionary form, was used 7 times. The accusative case was used 10 times and every time it was identical to the nominative, dictionary form. Genitive was also used 10 times, 4 times to signify the object in place of the accusative. All the other cases put together were used just 4 times. So out of 31 nouns and pronouns, 27 were either in the nominative or genitive forms.

Suffice to say, focusing your efforts on those two forms and just being aware of the others will go a very long way in Polish.

Anyway, I speak from the point of view of a non-native speaker who speaks Polish well enough to pass for a native speaker much of the time, though not always, and even then, my Polish is considered very good. I would like to help give other English speakers who may be struggling the foundations necessary to be able to understand the language and to be able to communicate in it comfortably and effectively, without overloading them with unnecessary complexity that would only stop them from getting off the ground. The highest levels of any language are not acquired by rule-learning, but by daily language use.

To be absolutely honest, I myself didn't actually know that the form was "ustąpić komuś czegoś" instead of "ustąpić komuś coś", so that would most likely belong in a thread called "Polish Language - Advanced concepts." This is most likely since the word isn't used that often, and when it is, it's usually used with "miejsca", and the phonetic difference between that and "miejsce" isn't that great. However, even if I used the grammatically incorrect accusative form in speech, I would still be understood just fine, and, chances are, nobody would notice.

All language learners are going to make mistakes. Not just non-native speakers, but children as well. That's what the whole learning process is about. I can't teach anyone university-level Polish, since I myself haven't reached such an advanced level of proficiency. But I have successfully managed to get a hang of the language, so I can hopefully give some useful insight from an English speaker's perspective.

Okay, so here's part two of my massively simplified, but still quite accurate description of how Polish works. In part three, I will try and deal with declension in more detail. And maybe there will be a part four on some strategies to put it all together and get it into your brain reasonably quick so that it becomes second nature, without getting too frustrated or bored to death.

VERBS IN MORE DETAIL - REDUCING MEMORY LOAD

Okay, now I'll be assuming you at least have a vague idea of what conjugation is and how it works, even if you can't conjugate a single Polish verb.

So, assuming you'd like to learn how to do this seemingly impossible feat, please don't waste your time staring at conjugation/declension tables. It's not going to help.

In fact, it's going to be counterproductive. Instead of learning lots of new words, you'll have wasted time learning 20 variations of the same word, many of which are hardly ever used, and when push comes to shove, you'll be none the wiser, because your head is filled with way too much unnecessary information.

Use what you already know instead of relearning the same thing over and over again. Don't try to learn everything at once. Just learn the most common and useful forms, and you can cross the bridge when you come to it as far as the less frequent forms are concerned. That said, there really aren't that many forms to learn, so if you're feeling really dedicated, you can try and learn it all in one go, but it's only through frequent use that they actually start to mean anything to you on a subconscious level, so my advice is to take it easy.

Now, let me introduce you to some secrets of this seemingly impossible irregular conjugation system. The problem is that grammarians want you to be able to work out all the possible forms from knowing just the infinitive. That might work in Italian, but it doesn't work in Polish. So by trying to fit the Polish language into an Italian-shaped hole, they end up introducing millions of incomprehensible rules to take into account historical sound changes from over a thousand years ago. And still fail and end up with a million exceptions.

Remembering irregular Polish verbs the easy way

I'm going to make a very bold proposition here:

There is an easy way. An easier way, anyway. In fact, despite the irregularities, it's probably easier than Italian or Spanish, because you don't need to know half as many suffixes.

To know how to make all the tenses of "pisać", all you really need to know is:


If a verb is very irregular, such as "prać", all you need to know to be able to conjugate it perfectly is:


Another seemingly horrible verb is "jechać." But you can make all the possible tenses perfectly knowing just this:


Apart from just a few exceptions, most notably with the word, "iść" and derivatives, the past and conditional tenses in Polish are very, very regular, so you can easily derive them from the infinitives. Where it is irregular, learning one or two extra words will help you derive the rest. But generally, the past tenses are quite nice and friendly and regular.

Yes. Regular. In Polish. I said it!

This doesn't mean easy, but it means easier. Learning a new language is always hard. As children, we take to it naturally and start using it without thinking why things are the way they are. But as adults, we find it difficult to accept new information uncritically, so seeing the logic in it helps a lot. I refer to the Romance languages a lot because I have in fact learnt Spanish. I could probably write a whole 'nother post about the easy way to remember Spanish verb endings, but that's not what this one is about. When it comes to verbs, though, I can honestly say that I believe that Polish is less taxing in terms of how much you have to remember.

The nonpast conjugation can seem like a pain, but here's how it works:

Much of the time, you only need to know the "he/she/it" form to make all the other forms. They just take the suffix you would expect.

Now, a quick recap of what the suffixes are:

The suffix for "I" is ę or m
The suffix for "you" is sz
The suffix for "we" is my
The suffix for "you (pl.) is cie
The suffix for "they" is ą

Here's an example for pisać:


And the past tense is very regular. Whereas the non-past is based on the "he/she/it" form, the past is based on the infinitive.


That's all the hard work done. If you need a different tense, all you need is to add the prefix na- or the word będę to the past form.

You only need to bother learning the "I" form separately if it's different, in which case the "they" form will be different too. Even then, it's going to be similar, perhaps lacking palatisation in the form of the letter 'i' or something. And the difference between the "I" and "they" forms is almost always just swapping the "ę" for an "ą" or the "m" for a "ją".

Let's try the non-past of jechać knowing the "I" and "he/she/it" forms alone:


In fact, I'm having a hard time trying to find exceptions to the above patterns. One I can think of is "ja dam" and "oni dadzą". But exceptions really aren't that common, and if they're there, they're very minor.

I know this might still seem complicated, but hopefully, knowing this will help you reduce your memory load by a factor of between 5 and 5 billion. And if you already know a few words, you'll notice that, for example, "prać" follows the exact same pattern as "brać," reducing your memory load still further. It really doesn't help knowing that it uses conjugation form 14d(iii) or whatever grammarians might have called it. If you already know "prać", you know "brać", and once you get the hang of the most common verbs, all the rest work pretty much by analogy.

Don't worry if you make a mistake and say "piszem" instead of "piszę". Chances are, nobody will even notice.

Feel free to use personal pronouns

Polish is technically a pro-drop language, much like Spanish or Italian. That means that since the verb already says who's doing what, you don't have to repeat the fact with an additional pronoun that says "I" or "you" or whatever.

But Polish doesn't really care if you do repeat it or not. It can be used for emphasis, but it doesn't have to be. You'll often hear Poles saying "ja mam" instead of "mam" simply because it actually doesn't at all matter which form you use.

If it makes it easier for you, don't let anyone dissuade you from using personal pronouns just like you would in English. It sounds quite alright, especially in speech. Poles do it all the time, why shouldn't you? The importance of whether you say "ja muszę iść" or just "muszę iść" in terms of intelligibility is about on the same level as how you pronounce "neither" in English. I say "neether". Maybe you say "nyther". It doesn't matter. Either one is fine.

And if you make a mistake and say "ja bierzę" instead of "ja biorę", you will be understood just fine thanks to the pronoun. It might also help cement the patterns ja goes with -ę/-m, ty goes with -sz, my goes with -my, wy goes with -cie and oni goes with -ą in your mind. Once that happens, you'll probably find you drop the pronoun naturally in the same places that Poles do, to save a syllable out of pure laziness.

Long words aren't really long words

The conditional word, "wyobrazilibyśmy" (we would imagine) might look scary. But it can also be written "my byśmy wyobrazili," because "byśmy" is the part that actually means "we would", and joining it to the preceding verb is just a spelling convention. It's still pronounced as though "wyobrazili" were written separately, and in fact the stress falls on the penultimate syllable of "wyobrazili" in "wyobrazilibyśmy".

In fact, "wyobrazilibyśmy" is actually three words. "Wyobrazili" ("imagined"), "by" ("would") and "śmy" (the last part of "jesteśmy," "we are"). So it's like writing wewouldimagine in English. Yes, it's long. But the information it contains isn't overly complex.

If you also notice that "obraz" means "image" and "wyobrazić" means "to imagine", it might make even more sense.

NB: you say "wyobraziłbym sobie" (because "I would imagine" works a bit like saying something like, "I would make a mental image for myself")

Reflexive verbs are just the way you smile in Polish

Now, if you know French, German, Spanish or Italian, reflexive verbs will make perfect sense to you. If you only know English, they might seem a bit odd, but the way they work is actually quite easy.

"się" means "oneself" or "one another". That's it. It's actually just the short form of the word "siebie," although the two are not interchangeable (though perhaps in the distant past they were).

Where in English you might say something like, "I am interested in something," Polish might say, "interesuję się czymś" (I interest myself with something). Americans say they "wait in line". Brits say they "queue up". It's the same thing.

Similarly, whereas in English you might say, "I'm having a bath," a Pole will say, "kąpię się" (I am bathing myself).

Sometimes, it's not so clear-cut. Poles say, "uśmiecham się". "I smile myself"? What? Well, if you like, you can think of it as "I make myself smile" or "I en-smile-en myself." Americans and Brits smile. Poles ensmilen themselves. Same thing.

Poles might also say, "czuję się źle" (I feel bad). In Spanish, you would also use a reflexive construction, "me siento mal." Translated literally into English, it means, "I feel myself bad." What can I say? That's just the way they say it.

That's it
I think that's enough about verbs. If you can get your head around this much, you will be the king or queen of conjugation and you will be able to impress your friends with the seeming ease that you are able to master what they themselves consider to be the incomprehensible idiosyncracies of their own language. Hopefully, this has been helpful. Next time, I'll try and cover declension in a little bit more detail.

WARNING: ADVANCED INFORMATION
Now, I hesitate to include this, but for the sake of completeness, this might be useful if you're already on your way to becoming a conjugation master.

While 95% of the time, the Polish past tense is regular or almost regular and at most, you might have a slight change in vowel (widzieć - widział) which no beginner needs to worry about and is something that's best left to be picked up naturally, there is some method in the madness for the other 5%, so if you're tackling these more difficult ones, this might help:

Most thorough, I commend you!

The conjugation patterns of Polish can gently drive one to distraction and they need this type of comprehensive overview. "Basic concepts"??? Not so basic:-)

Thanks, Lyzko. I guess I should have named the thread something like "Tricks to make learning Polish easier."

Anyway, if anyone has got through the section on verbs, they will now, with the help of a dictionary, be perfectly well equipped to understand their first Polish song.

So, if you've got this far, well done! This song will hopefully demonstrate how lovely and regular the Polish past tense is, and you might even enjoy it:

Try your hand at translating this song: Kasia Klich - Będę robić nic.
youtube.com/watch?v=2kz1t1LqI-M

The lyrics are here:
tekstowo.pl/piosenka,kasia_klich,bede_robic_nic.html

FYI, "będę robić nic" means "I'll be doing nothing"

Now, so you don't spend all night wading through a dictionary, here are the verbs and their meanings. Try and figure out what their conjugated versions in the lyrics mean. You'll quickly realise that Polish doesn't have to be scary!

Have got my head around it, and understand all this with no problems.This is what i meant when i said before that i was reasonably ok with verbs.

Past, present ,future i have no problem with. Conditional i find slightly more difficult.
Word order is confusing, it can be just like in English, or the total opposite.
I just seem to make mistake after mistake, despite few problems with verbs, which you would think would be the hard part!
Haven't had time to listen to the song yet, too tired, so will listen tomorrow.
Looking forward to all the new lessons:):)

I am truly amazed by your extremely deep understanding of Polish.


Everyone listening to this song should notice that its title was deliberately meant to be przewrotny (sorry, I don't know an English equivalent of this adjective). In reality, such a phrase requires the double negation in order to be proper Polish - "Nie będę robić nic ".


Nor did the authors of the writing encouraging people to give up a seat to an elderly person on a tram in Warsaw in which I travelled some years ago. The (erroneous) writing was "Ustąp mi miejsce".

An excellent observation.


Good to know I'm not alone :)


Officially, if you use the pronoun like you would in English, you also use the same word order as in English.
"My byśmy robili"
"We would be doing"

If you drop the pronoun, Polish reverses the word order.
"Robilibyśmy"
"We would be doing"

That's the official version. If you use the pronoun, put all modifying words such as "mi" "się" "by" before the verb. There's no reason for this other than the fact that some people decided that it sounded cool that way. People try to stick to the official guidelines, especially if they consider themselves educated, but you will hear people saying "my robilibyśmy" and "byśmy robili" in speech all the time because it really doesn't make any difference and the rule is quite arbitrary. It's hard to call it a grammatical mistake, since in Polish, word order is not really that important. It's more of a stylistic thing.


They're not necessarily mistakes, as in your "bo już jadłam" example from a previous post. You have already achieved an amazing feat. Encoding a thought into the words of a foreign language, producing the words in speech and actually managing to get the other person to understand exactly what you mean is a hugely complex process, and is an amazing achievement if you succeed, even if you bend the rules a bit. And while knowing some of the rules does help one get started, nobody expects a native, let alone a non-native speaker to go exactly by the book.

Regardless, you will keep on making mistakes! Native speakers make them too like in the case of "byśmy robili" without the pronoun. Lots of native speakers too use the Genitive in place of the Accusative or decline dogs as though they were people.

Learning a language is a bit like learning to play a sport. Knowing the rules certainly helps, but no matter how well you know all the intricacies of football in theory, it won't win you the World Cup. It's only practice that makes perfect, and no-one starts off being good at a sport. In fact, we all start off being pretty bad.

Think of all the great conversations you've had with people who don't speak English as their first language and have made every mistake in the book. They were still great conversations. You still understood each other. And even if you had a misunderstanding, it was probably quite humorous. I fondly recall the many mistakes I've made while speaking Polish, some of which resulted in what I said being misinterpreted as a hilarious sexual innuendo. No doubt I will make more mistakes of the sort. It's all part of the fun, so don't sweat it.

Speak as well as you can. If you're not sure what the right word is, say the wrong word, and see what happens. It might be right after all, or someone will tell you what the right word is. And having someone tell you that in person is more memorable and useful than reading all the language books in the world.

Okay. This is part 2a. Before I cover declension in more detail, I think this part of everyday Polish can be super-difficult for learners, and here I will try to make it simpler.

MARKING DIRECT OBJECTS - THE EASY-ISH WAY

Now, this is a contentious part of Polish grammar and probably one of the most difficult parts for a beginner to get right, not because it's particularly hard in and of itself, but because the descriptions of it are so damn convoluted.

Originally, when I wrote this post, I wrote lots of what I believed were interesting things about this subject, but, to be honest, I just have a verbose writing style, and so here, I have decided to cut the crap and give it to you straight. If anyone's struggled with this part of Polish before, they've read through enough rubbish already.

Forget all the complications of whether to use the Genitive or Accusative case. Think along the lines of how to get the direct object in the correct form.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Objective Form.

How to make the Objective Form

Here is a concise set of rules for marking the direct object of any verb.


There you have it. Now that wasn't so bad, was it?

This is amazing. I will be using this as a reference and return to read it. Your efforts and time is very worthwhile and helpful - thank you!

"Jan" in English is a woman's name. If you're translating into English, you might want to translate the name also, like into "John" because someone might think you are talking about a woman here.

+1


Oh yeah, i can safely say at times it's been humorous!

LEARNING DECLENSION - THE EASY-ISH WAY

The cases help in freeing word order and case and gender agreement is a redundancy feature, which in turn helps to make the language more robust and increases the threshold of how noisy it can get before the listener can no longer work out what is being said. Learning this will be extremely complex and painful if you go about it the wrong way. But children don't find it that difficult.

Ask any young Polish child. They have absolutely no idea what the Dative is. If you asked them what the "celownik" is, they might at best guess it's something to do with "aiming" ("celowanie") or a "destination" ("cel"). That guess would be quite accurate - it definitely is something to do with a destination, but they still wouldn't have a clue about what it actually is.

They have no idea why they sometimes say a word one way and sometimes another way. When they speak, they don't get into a panic thinking, "Oh no! Do I use the Instrumental or the Genitive?" They have no concept of what the Instrumental or Genitive might be. They just know. And later on, I will try and help you to be able to "just know" too.

And I'm not going to tie you up and yell, "Kogo? Czego?" at you, demanding you give me the correct form of a noun or risk getting a painful electric shock. I promise. Even if you knew how to decline them perfectly, it wouldn't help you use them correctly. And yet little kids learn both declension AND correct use, so there must be a way.

Let's take a step back, first. I'd like you to realise that Polish, despite the fact it uses declension and that it's got an alien phonology and orthography, is actually very similar to English. It's still part of the same Indo-European super-family, and even though common words and Germanic loanwords in Polish have frequently changed beyond recognition, "cierń" ("thorn"), the languages have a lot more in common than it might seem.

Here is a fragment of Alice in Wonderland in the original English, a Polish translation I've found online, and lastly, a very literal word-for-word translation of the Polish back to English.




Try doing a word-for-word translation of Japanese. You will get gibberish. Polish, on the other hand, is still a very English-like language, but dressed up in Slavic clothing.

The major differences are the topic of this post. In Polish, the forms of words are very interdependent. In one sentence, you see gender agreement, with these words ending in 'a': "Alicja", "rosła", "była", "zmuszona". In another, you see both case and gender agreement with the preposition "z", with all these words ending in 'ą': "jedną", "ręką", "opartą", "drugą", "owiniętą". This is an alien feature in English.

So how do you produce it?

THE BIG DECLENSION SECRET

Well, how do children learn it? They don't think in terms of case endings. They think in terms of patterns. It's far easier to learn meaningful patterns than it is to learn abstract case endings.

And it's no use knowing that the preposition "od" means "from" if you don't know how to use it. Being able to decline nouns in the Genitive case perfectly will get you absolutely nowhere. Fast.

But if you learn a pattern like, "od tego małego pieska" ("from this little dog"),
you can, just like a child, be completely unaware of what cases are, and modify the pattern, changing, adding or deleting words to suit your needs.

You can, then, with little effort say
"od tamtego dużego wilczura" ("from that big German Shepherd"),
"od nauczyciela" ("from the teacher"),
"obok tego starego faceta" ("next to that old man"),
"z tego dużego drzewa" ("out of that big tree"),
"nie chcę ciasta" ("I don't want cake").

This pattern is accurate for all nouns that end in "o", "e". It's also accurate for nouns ending in consonants that refer to people or animals, and for some things as well. It applies, with few, if any modifications, for somewhere close to half of all Polish nouns. With just this one little pattern, you've tackled possession, the direct object for negative verbs and the prepositions, "od, do, z, dla, bez, oprócz, obok, koło, blisko, zamiast, naprzeciwko" and you've saved yourself from learning hundreds, if not thousands of complicated rules.

Similarly, if you learn, "ku temu małemu pieskowi" ("towards this little dog"), you can follow the same pattern to say "ku tamtemu malutkiemu kotkowi" ("towards that tiny kitten"), "przydało się tamtemu policjantowi" ("it came in useful for that policeman"), "mojemu najlepszemu przyjacielowi" ("to my best friend").

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. The only difference is that you might have to learn a slightly different pattern for words ending in "o" and for words ending in "a", for example, 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.

Grammarians try to break down the patterns and investigate how they have arisen and how the individual elements fit in together. This might be interesting if you're a linguist, but it's not very helpful, and that's not how your brain works.

Why this works, and why it's so much easier

Your brain works by matching patterns. That's how redundancy works in a language. If a Polish listener mishears something in a noisy environment, then there will be a pattern mismatch, and the little elves in his head will quickly be able to spot the error and fill in the gaps by looking at the adjacent words and matching them to the most likely pattern. The person is completely unaware that this is what his brain is doing, and probably won't even realise that he heard something wrong, because the erroneous information was already automatically corrected by his brain.

Knowing just a few patterns will enable you to produce very clear and understandable Polish much of the time, and even if there are sound changes and irregularities, they will not at all impede understanding, because the listener will recognise the pattern.

And knowing perhaps a few dozen of these patterns will quickly get you up to the 90% mark. This is much better than learning innumerable complex rules and case endings.

In my next post, I will try and identify the common patterns for all the seven cases so that you can quickly start being able to produce perfectly correct Polish much of the time, or, at the very worst, easily understandable Polish.

Okay, the most important set of patterns first.

DECLENSION IN DETAIL: GENITIVE PATTERNS

These are by far the most important patterns in Polish, and probably account for about 60-90% of the noun changes you will come across. The genitive is a difficult case to decline, but it can still be summarised in just a few patterns.

Uses

1) To indicate the direct object in certain situations. I've already hinted at simplifying this bit of Polish grammar in Objective Forms earlier, and I will cover exactly how to do this in Objective Patterns.


2) To indicate possession.


3) In set time phrases, sometimes in place of an English preposition


4) With certain prepositions


Getting it right
The word "nie" and most of the above prepositions are a dead giveaway that one of the above patterns will follow. As soon as you hear or see one of those words, you should expect these patterns to follow, and as soon as you utter one of those words, these patterns should be at the tip of your tongue.

A note on sound changes
Sound/spelling changes account for a lot of the apparent messiness of the Polish declension system. For heaven's sake, don't worry about them. Just follow systematic patterns that work to produce a perfect or close-to-perfect result 90% of the time, and the other 10% will take care of itself as you become more familiar with the language. The patterns almost always stay intact, and whatever changes do occur are typically just to keep things in line with Polish pronunciation.

For example, the typical ending for the locative case is 'ie'. "Pożar" means "blaze". But you say "w pożarze" and not "w pożarie", because the "ri" sequence began to be pronounced as "rz" at some point. That's why Rome in Polish is "Rzym" and not "Rim". It would be easier if Polish spelling just wrote the "rz" sound as "ri" because then the whole declension system would make a lot more sense on paper, but alas, that is not the case.

For the most part, there's not much point learning about the sound changes and you can just pick them up naturally. If you want to get a head start, then just be aware that Polish can't stand certain letter combinations, so all native Polish words change them. For example, it hates 'ri', 'di', 'ti', 'łi', 'ly', 'ge', 'ke', "gy", "ky" and changes all to 'rzy', 'dzi', 'ci', 'l', 'li', 'gie', 'kie', "gi", "ki". It also hates some vowel combinations such as "iy" and will simplify them to just "i". If you're aware of this, you will be far less surprised that the possessive form of "Babcia" (Grandma) is "Babci" and not "Babciy" and that instead of saying "w sadie" the correct form is "w sadzie". In fact, in these two examples, and in fact most of the time in general, the "wrong", systematic form would sound almost identical anyway, so it's not a problem if you start off using it.

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.


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 mężczyzna, cieśla, kolega, poeta (nouns of masculine gender, but ending in -a).

I wouldn't go as far as saying that it would sound almost identical in case of "w sadie" vs "w sadzie", to be honest... As in "Ty gadie!" vs "Ty gadzie!" Or "na paradie" vs "na paradzie". But maybe it's because I'm a native speaker. Anyway, people would probably understand what you're saying but would think that you're Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian, as "w sadie" is a very "Russian" way of pronouncing Polish words :)


You know, when I look at this thread I think that I'd probably give up if I were a foreigner trying to learn Polish... lol It all looks so complicated o_O

Confused.com
I understand that you're trying to simplify the cases for us, but i have a problem.
The above sentence presumes knowledge of the preposition 'z'.
I understood it to mean' with'.
Now i know full well that words can have more than one meaning, and before i looked at the English, i read it as' with that big tree'.

Didn't make a lot of sense, but often Polish doesn't!
I thought it was z + instrumental e.g Chciałabym kawę z mlekiem ( I would like coffee with milk )
Exactly how many rules does the preposition z have?
From looking at the sentence, am i right in thinking it's in the genitive? I just don't understand. There doesn't seem to be anything possessive about that sentence at all. Drzewa is genitive form of tree, but tego dużego is masculine?

Unfortunately, i am one of those people who analyses everything to death.
Now you can tell me it's easier to learn the sentences like a child does, but my above example is already throwing up problems.

Tbh, the more i know, the harder it gets. Now i have virtually given up speaking in Polish, because i am analysing every word and wondering which case etc it's in.

At least everyone understood me before,even when my Polish was really bad. Trouble is i don't want to speak broken Polish for the rest of my life:(:(

Nie lubię Polskiego Języka. I know 100% that this sentence is correct.

It should be "Nie lubię języka polskiego"

I have no idea ;D
All I can is give some examples:

"Ten stół jest zrobiony z tego dużego drzewa, które rosło za stodołą."
"This table is made out of that big tree, which was growing behind the barn."

"To jabłko spadło z tego dużego drzewa."
"This apple fell from this big tree."

"Gdzie idziesz z tym drzewem?"
"Where are you going with this tree?" (it would imply someone is carrying a small tree or firewood)


Speak Polish no matter if it's broken or not! There's no other way! xD I'm a perfectionist too, but you can't get always everything right, you have to accept that ;) Talk to Poles, discuss with them, observe how they write in Polish, how they speak in Polish. Nobody's writing in the "Rozmowy po polsku" section of the forum! Unbelievable! I was discussing with Russians using a Polish-Russian translator, for God's sake! xD And I don't have a Cyrillic keyboard! ;D

Oh, and:

"Co się stało z tym dużym drzewem?"
"What has happened to this big tree?"

"Coś złego dzieje się z tym dużym drzewem."
"Something bad is happening to this big tree."

Well spotted! "z" was the only preposition in that list that could take two cases!

So yes, two rules. I haven't covered the other one yet.

Remember "kanapka z serem" and "sos z sera pleśniowego"? I think I mentioned this whole thing before.

"z czegoś" means out of something
"z czymś" means with something

so "z tego dużego drzewa" means out of this big tree
and "z tym dużym drzewem" means with this big tree

z on its own doesn't really mean anything until you match it up with a particular pattern.

z .... -em/ą = with

z .... -a/y = out of

Kawa z mlekiem = coffee with milk
Ser z koziego mleka = goat's cheese (lit "cheese out of goat milk")

You can use "ser z tego koziego mleka" as a template pattern and swap words in it to construct all the following examples:

"prezent dla twojego dziecka" = "a present for your child"

See what I've done there? I've changed every word and deleted "tego", but the pattern is identical. You speak in English using formulae you've been using since you were a child. Polish does the same thing, and about 90% of the language is just variations on the same common patterns. And instead of analysing each and every word, plugging words in to common patterns is a quick way of getting it right.

They'll have a bloody good laugh if i start posting in there

Hmm, as i expected. 2 different examples using the preposition 'z'. Now how on earth am i supposed to know whether 'z' means 'out of', ' with ' or ' from '?

Last example, you could use all 3 meanings of ' z'.
Incidentally, what case is Zrobiony in? Haven't come across that before

.


Not much hope for me is there? Thanks for correcting me.

To be honest, British English speakers tend to coalesce the "di" sound to "j", and you hear words such as "dew" being pronounced every which way, from "doo", to "dyoo", to something like Polish "dziu", to something like "Jew". So many, in trying to pronounce "na paradie" would actually say something that sounded like "na paradzie" anyway. Even if they did keep the "d" and "y" sound distinct, they would be well understood, which is why I don't think it's important to worry about getting it wrong. Just being aware that Polish tends to convert "di" to 'dzi" is good enough, and I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Ziemowit

Widziałem dwóch mężczyzn
Widziałem dwie kobiety

It's all part of a broader pattern of widziałem te dwie śliczne kobiety vs nie widziałem tych dwóch ślicznych kobiet_.


I would disagree and say that it is in fact almost wholly unimportant if you learn a noun as part of a demonstrative+noun or article+noun pair. Of course, that's just my personal bias, because I'm a strong believer in learning by doing, and I think grammatical overthinking really gets in the way of getting people to say what they want to say.

To be honest, I only know a few words of French from school, so I can't remember much what it's like, but Spanish is very much like Polish, in that the final vowel letter of a word will with good accuracy determine the gender of the noun. However, it is common practice to learn words in article+noun pairs, since the gender information is encoded in the article and I think demonstrative+noun pairs are a good strategy for learning Polish words too, as in "ten mężczyzna" and "ten satelita". Now, of course I quickly came across exceptions in Spanish, such as "el idioma" and "el problema" and "el día" which are masculine, and even "el alma" and "el agua", which, despite using the masculine article are actually feminine, but it's not seriously problematic to memorise and practice using those exceptions correctly once you come across them in either Polish or Spanish.

As for "ten mężczyzna", remembering it as a demonstrative+noun pair will solve all declension problems. It's much easier to remember the phonetic difference ("ten" vs "ta") than somehow trying to memorise the abstract concept of "grammatical masculinity" that means nothing to English speakers. After a while, you get used to "mężczyzna" going with adjectives ending in "y", and saying it any differently would sound weird. In fact, in Spanish I didn't even notice that the word "el día" was masculine and a rare exception because "buenos días" and "todos los días" are such common phrases, that you sort of automatically match the pattern if you add modifiers of your own and use it correctly anyway without being conscious of its gender or its exceptional nature. The case with perfective and imperfective verbs is similar. It's much easier to associate them with clear meanings such as "to do" vs "to be doing" than to associate one with the grammatical concept of perfectivity and the other with imperfectivity.

In "ten mężczyzna", any adjectives will have to match the word "ten", and "ten" itself will follow the same patterns as in every other "ten" you've ever seen. Mężczyzna itself, will decline in a similar manner to any other noun ending in 'a' would (widziałem mężczyznę). And you can learn the specifics of individual nouns once you get to the point of using them. Learning them before you can actually understand simple spoken or written language is unnecessary and painful.

So, of course there are exceptions to the rule, but you will get a lot further learning just a few ideas that work 95% of the time, than learning the 1000 exceptions that work only 5% of the time. Kids don't start off knowing the 1000 exceptions before they start attempting and succeeding at producing correct Polish. So I'm a big fan of crossing a bridge only once you come to it. In fact, I believe that if you are reasonably confident in the general rules of a language, you'll be able to spot exceptions and learn them more easily than if you focus on them outright. And it's much nicer just making a mental note to yourself, "Oh, okay, so you say it that way," than trying to get it right first time.

Learning any new language is hugely demanding on memory at first, but it becomes much easier once you begin to understand it, until it becomes a passive process, as you learn it in a relaxing manner through just watching TV, reading a book, listening to music or having a conversation. What I'm trying to do here is to lower the barrier to get to the point where one can simply understand at least a moderate amount of the language in speech or in writing, because once you get to that point, the rest is much easier, because you can learn a lot of it passively and without much effort.

For anyone who is struggling to learn Polish, I think that learning a few hard and fast rules and the basic patterns to get to the point of being able to understand and produce reasonably accurate Polish most of the time is a great starting point. Polish is significantly different to other Western European languages, and so I think minimum effort, maximum results is the best way to get started, and then once you know enough to be able to comprehend a language fairly well, you can begin to fill in the gaps, expand on the patterns you already know, and allow the exceptions slowly take care of themselves as you passively absorb the language's idiosyncracies.

The exceptions to the rules in Spanish and Polish seem fairly easy to me now since I understand the languages and I've heard those exceptions used hundreds of times, so I'm familiar with them, and the more systematic forms now sound wrong to me. But learning the exceptions outright at the beginning, and especially doing so for Polish, would have driven me absolutely crazy.

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Ok, but what about Paulina's example ( post 24 ) where ' z ' means 'to' ?

It still means "with".

"Co się stało z tym dużym drzewem" means

"What has happened with this big tree?"

It's just that in English, it sounds better using the word "to" and saying "to this big tree". But it literally still means "with", and you can say it the Polish way in English too.

"What has happened with you?"
"What has happened to you?"
There's a slightly different nuance in the two English sentences. "to" sounds a bit more involuntary.

Polish likes to use the "with" form a lot more.

But Polish can also say both "Co się z tobą stało?" and "Co ci się stało?" in much the same way as English, so it's very similar.

One can say "goat's cheese" (like "cow's milk") or is it only "goat cheese"?

Btw, you can also say "kozi ser/ser kozi" = goat cheese


Oh, OK... I didn't know that :)


How do you know? And even if, there's like the whole Polish internet out there! ;) You just have to find a forum, or even better, a blog for yourself to comment. My Russian friend has learned Polish solely by discussing with Poles on two internet blogs about Polish-Russian relations (one of those blogs was run by a Russian writing in a broken Polish). We're still impressed by her Polish, although she still makes mistakes. I think that the good thing about those discussions was that Poles rarely corrected her and probably thanks to this she wasn't too easily discouraged. Discussion was all that mattered! ;) Of course, it was easier for her - being Russian - but still... Maybe create your own blog in Polish? I could comment :)

Btw, I've studied English since high school, but I still don't get and hate English Tenses, I still make mistakes and I do a spell check ALL THE TIME ;D


From context!

"To jabłko spadłoz tego dużego drzewa."
"This apple fellfrom this big tree."

"To pióro spadłoz nieba."
"This feather fellfrom the sky."

Treat language like a puzzle you have to... no... you want to solve ;) That's my way with Russian language, because I dislike any grammar of whatever language ;D


Kcharlie's right ;)

Ok, panic over!
I think you might have your work cut out with educating me with the joys of the Polish language!
Thanks for all the detailed explanations though, you've obviously put a lot of thought into this :):)
Not to mention time!

It doesn't matter. Whichever form you prefer. I'm used to calling it "goat's cheese" and I imagine "goat cheese" should be cheese made out of goats, but in fact, I think "goat cheese" is probably the more common form.

What do you say to this, pam? :)
And of course for me watching films and TV series in English was enormous help... Do you have access to Polish TV?


Oh, OK, thanks! :)

what's wrong with "nie lubię polskiego języka"?

The only mistake pam made is writing "polskiego" with capital letter :)

Polak/Polka/Polska - nouns = big letter
polski/polska/polskie - adjectives = small letter


I think you underrate your skills.

I say a big yes!
Used to have access to Polsat when my lodger was here, but he's gone now ( with dish and decoder ):):)
I watch Polish TV at friend's houses sometimes, but i would need it at home to really benefit from watching it.