Polish grammar from A to Z

Polish looks harder than it is. Unlike English, the spelling is almost perfectly phonetic: once you know the rules you can read aloud any word you have never seen, and you will never meet a “though, through, tough” again. What is unfamiliar is not the letters but their combinations — sz, cz, rz — and the small marks above and below them, which turn one letter into another. Two habits from English need unlearning: Polish vowels are short and pure, never gliding into a diphthong, and a voiced consonant at the end of a word is said voiceless — chleb ends in a p.

A Polish sentence is simpler than an English one in several ways. There is no do to build a question or a negation, nothing is inverted, and the subject pronoun is usually left out because the ending of the verb already names the person: Mieszkam w Berlinie is “I live in Berlin”, with no separate word for “I”. What English does with word order and small words, Polish does with endings — which is why the order can move without the meaning turning round. This section gives the building blocks: być (to be), to jest (this is), czy for questions and nie for negation.

In English a number is just a number: two cats, five cats, five students. Polish numbers do more. One and two agree with the gender (jedna kawa, dwie kawy), and the number decides the case of the noun after it: dwa koty, but pięć kotów. Groups with men have forms of their own (pięciu studentów), children are counted with collective numbers (dwoje dzieci). The time and the date use ordinals: o ósmej — at eight, literally “at the eighth”; siedemnastego października — on the 17th of October.

English nouns have no grammatical gender: a table is “it”, and so is a car. Every Polish noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and the adjective, the word for “this”, the word for “my” and later the past tense all follow it. The good news is that the ending usually tells you which: dom is masculine, kawa feminine, okno neuter. There is no “a” and no “the” — what is known and what is new shows in the word order. And two distinctions are new to an English speaker: whether a masculine noun is alive changes its object form, and whether a group contains a man changes the plural.

English tells you who does what to whom by word order and by prepositions: “Mum gives the cat milk”, “with Mum”, “to Mum”, “Mum’s house”. Polish puts most of that information into the ending of the noun: mama, mamy, mamie, mamę, mamą, mamo. English still does this with its pronouns — “I”, “me”, “my” are three cases of one word — so the idea is not as foreign as it sounds; Polish simply does it with every noun. Seven cases sound like a lot, but the endings repeat more than the tables suggest. Start with the ones you need in your first week: the accusative for what you buy and drink, the locative for where you are, the instrumental for “with” and for your job, and the genitive for “from”, “to” and “without”.

Polish pronouns are closer to English than they look. There is an “I”, a “you”, a “he” and a “she”, and they change their form just as English “I, me, my” or “he, him, his” do. Three things are new. The subject pronoun is usually dropped, because the verb ending already says who is acting. “You” splits four ways: one friend, several people, and a polite “you” that is not a pronoun at all but a noun — pan “sir”, pani “madam”. And for what belongs to the subject itself Polish has a word of its own, swój, where English “his” stays ambiguous.

An English adjective never changes: a new house, a new car, new houses, in a new house. A Polish adjective follows its noun everywhere — into its gender, its number and every one of the seven cases. That sounds like a lot, but it is the most regular part of the whole declension: an adjective has fewer endings than a noun, and almost all adjectives share them. Three things stand out for English speakers: the adjective agrees even after “to be” (szkoła jest nowa), groups with men have a plural of their own (nowi koledzy), and the adverb has its own ending, much as English has “-ly” — mówi szybko, “she speaks quickly”.

In English a preposition is all you need: “in the house”, “into the house”, “out of the house”. In Polish every preposition also requires a particular case, and because there is no article you see that case on the noun itself: w domu, do domu, przed domem. The pairs English already makes — “in” and “into”, “at” and “to” — Polish makes too, often with a different preposition and a different case for “where?”, “where to?” and “where from?”. And the commonest small prepositions all take the genitive.

An English verb in the present has two forms: “read” and “reads”. A Polish one has six, one for each person, and each sounds different. That is why the pronoun is usually not needed: czytam already means “I read”. Almost every verb follows one of three patterns, named after their first two forms: -am/-asz, -ę/-isz and -ę/-esz. Unfortunately the infinitive does not tell you the pattern, so you learn every verb with its forms for “I” and “you”. And here is something English speakers will enjoy: there is no continuous form. czytam is “I read” and “I am reading” alike.

English chooses between “I read”, “I was reading”, “I have read”, “I had read” and “I used to read”. Polish has one past tense for all of them. In exchange, the Polish form says something the English one never does: whether a man or a woman is speaking. Piotr says byłem, Ania says byłam — both “I was”. The rest — whether an action got finished or was just going on — is done by the aspect you already know. Spot the little -ł- and you can spot every past tense.

Polish has two ways into the future, and the verb itself decides which one applies. Imperfective verbs form it with będę, much as English uses “will”: będę czytać — I will be reading. Perfective verbs need nothing: their forms that look like a present already mean the future — przeczytam, I will read it (to the end). And as in English, a plain present is often enough for a plan: Jutro jadę do Krakowa, “I’m going to Kraków tomorrow”.

English has one verb “do” and a whole machinery of tenses around it: I do, I am doing, I have done, I was doing, I had done. Polish has three tenses and puts the rest into the verb itself: robić means “to do, to be doing”, zrobić means “to do and get it done”. Almost every verb has such a partner. It sounds like twice the vocabulary — in fact it is one question you ask about every sentence: is this about the process or about the result? Be warned that the English tenses only half help. “I was doing” and “I have done” point the right way often enough to be tempting and wrongly often enough to mislead.

If you can only make statements in Polish, you soon sound either blunt or stiff. This section gives you the forms for getting somebody to do something and for talking about what is not real: the imperative (Zamknij okno!), the polite request (Proszę usiąść, Niech pan wejdzie), the conditional for wishes (Chciałabym kawę, “I’d like a coffee”) and sentences with gdyby and żeby. One little word runs through all of it, the Polish “would”: by. It turns a past-tense form into a wish, an idea or an aim.

Modal verbs get you further in your first week than you would think: Muszę iść “I have to go”, Czy mogę zapłacić kartą? “Can I pay by card?”, Lubię pływać “I like swimming”. The pattern is the same as in English — a modal and an infinitive — except that the Polish modal is a full verb with six endings, and there is never a “to” in between. Add a few words that never change at all, such as trzeba “one has to” and można “one can”, and the odd powinien “should”, which looks like an adjective.

English “go” covers walking, driving, flying and going on holiday. Polish always says whether you are on foot (iść, chodzić) or in a vehicle (jechać, jeździć), and it has two imperfective verbs for each: one for a single trip in one direction, now or firmly planned, and one for habit, to and fro, and ability. Prefixes give the trip a direction, much as English particles do — przyjść “come, arrive”, wyjść “go out” — and make the verb perfective. And with pójść and pojechać you say that somebody has gone and is not back yet, the way English “he has gone to the shop” does.

Polish subordinate clauses will feel familiar: the word order inside them is the same as in a main clause, just as in English — bo jestem chory, “because I am ill”. What is new is that Polish splits some English words — “and” into i and a — and refuses some English shortcuts: you cannot drop “that”, you do not shift the tense back in reported speech (“she said she was ill”), and where English says “something to read”, Polish needs a verbal noun: coś do czytania.

Master the forms and you sound correct; master the little words and you sound natural. Polish uses diminutives far more than English uses “-ie” and “-y”, and not only for small things: kawka is simply a coffee ordered in a friendly way, like British “a cuppa”. And words such as już, jeszcze, chyba or przecież show what you expect, suppose or take for granted — the job English does with tone and tag questions.