To me, at means: in/on the school grounds ....... so it can also be outside school, too
Every time I start analyzing the English preposition
at, I start thinking of the Polish preposition
u. This rarely mentioned
u seems to have been pushed away to the outskirts of the language in the course of its development. For me, it seems it have an old historical kinship with the English preposition
at, possibly reaching down to the Indo-European roots of both languages.
Several examples of the usage of this preposition in Polish:
u lekarza, u kowala, u nas/was/ciebie/nich/mnie etc., kamień u szyi, u podnóża góry, kula u nogi, kobyłka u płotu, być u władzy, być u kresu wytrzymałości, u góry, u dołu. What do you think of this
u, guys?
"Poszedłem do szkoły"
No. That implies walking to school.
Basically yes - it implies walking to school. But there is also a specific use of that verb meaning "attending school". You may, for example, say: "
Poszedł do szkoły w wieku pięciu lat" or "
Janek poszedł do szkoły razem z Zosią". In the latter case, the meaning will depend on the context - either (1) Janek and Zosia were walking to school together, or (2) both of them started school at the same moment in time.
examples?
One such example may be the noun 'hate'. Foreign people who are not that deep into Polish, seeing 'hate' mostly in internet contexts, would be inclined to think that 'hate' is widely, almost universally used in Polish having pushed away the noun 'nienawiść'. In reality, the noun 'hate' is exclusively used in internet contexts and almost never used in other types of contexts. Thus, if you hear
hate w stosunku do imigrantów, you instantly imagine the hate as is expressed on the internet rather than the more traditional type of hate exercized when attacking an immigrant verbally or physically. In the latter context, you will certainly use the expression
przykład nienawiści do imigrantów and never
przykład hate'u w stosunku do immigrantów. Thus 'hate' used in Polish would mean 'nienawiść internetowa' specifically.