Category Archives: Grammar

The Dative, part 3

19
Nov
2008

It’s been a while, a looong while actually, since our last post about nouns and cases. I think I started telling you about the dative case and then promptly began to practice avoidance. So where were we last? Oh yes, personal pronouns and indirect objects, me thinks.
So, let’s quickly go back and review. I told [...]

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Prepositions, part 1

31
Oct
2008

A while back Gary sent me an email, which for the life of me I can’t find anywhere now – my mailbox self-destructed earlier this week and all my messages disappeared into the bottomless internet pit. But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. Gary asked for a post about prepositions, and when [...]

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Verbs of Motion, Part 2

19
Oct
2008

Today’s post is inspired by Pinolona’s comment and her plea for help. Help with what? Polish verbs, of course.
She pointed out that both “iść” and “chodzić” are imperfective verbs, but since I suspect that to most people the word “imperfective” means about as much as “lähteitä tai viitteitä” to me (hint – not much at [...]

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Verbs of Motion

16
Oct
2008

Polish verbs make me cry. And I don’t mean the tears of joy here, that’s for sure.
I’ve never thought about just how evil they can be until recently. I was working on a project, which demanded expert knowledge of verbs, Polish verbs, naturally, and that was a real eye-opener for me. I’ve never realized just [...]

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Why We Need Professor Miodek

25
Sep
2008

Lately I’ve been writing in Polish more and more, and while I’ve always thought that my Polish spelling skills were decent, now I’m not so sure. In fact, I am sure - they suck.
It’s of very little consolation that I am not alone. Any random read of internet forums populated by Poles will prove that [...]

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Dative Case, part 2

21
Sep
2008

After studying Fran’s wonderful poem in the last post, you should know a little bit about the dative case (celownik) already. It’s a very unassuming case, really. And when you see it in a sentence, it will be most likely used to modify a personal pronoun in expressions like these:

Jest mi gorąco. – I am [...]

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Dative Case, part 1

17
Sep
2008

It’s been a while since we talked about our lovely Polish noun cases, so I thought we might get back to it today.
But first, I have a little treat for you. One of our readers, as it turned out, is also a very talented poet. I mean, you have to be talented to write a [...]

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The Mysterious Ways of Polish Surnames, part 2

12
Sep
2008

As David pointed out in the comment section to the previous post, we still have one more group of Polish last names to discuss. Actually, come to think of it, TWO more.
But let’s start with the easier one of the two:
4. Surnames ending in vowels OTHER than “a”, “i” and “y”. And yes, “y” is [...]

By Anna | Also posted in Culture | Comments (2)

The Mysterious Ways of Polish Surnames

9
Sep
2008

My friend called me today and that should be good news, right? But it wasn’t. The poor woman was very stressed and urgently requested my help. You see, she was applying for a visa to one of those countries that still require a woman to provide information about her male guardian, either a father or [...]

By Anna | Also posted in Culture | Comments (4)

This and That

21
Aug
2008

The distinction between “this” and “that” is more or less clear in English. Or at least I’ve always thought so. But as one of our readers has pointed out, while “this” is easier to grasp when translated into a foreign language, things can get really goofy with “that”.
Fortunately, I can assure you that people who [...]

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