I’ve been learning Polish for more or less ten weeks and it’s time for an update as to my progress or lack thereof.

Finally, I am making some slight progress. I can almost make a sentence. Yep, it has taken me this long, but I’m starting to say things like ‘mam dużego psa’ (I have a big dog) or ‘mam czarnego kota’ (I have a black cat).

This is surprisingly difficult in Polish. In Spanish, a non-inflected language, it is simple.  ‘I have a black cat’ is ‘tengo un gato negro. There is no messing around with endings or worrying about cases. ‘Gato’ and ‘negro’ are used as found in the dictionary.

Polish is inflected, so to say ‘I have a black cat’, you have to remember that both ‘black’ and ‘cat’ are in the accusative case, and then construct the sentence accordingly.

‘Cat’ in the dictionary is ‘Kot’. As ‘kot’ is in the accusative and is masculine, you add an ‘a’.

‘Black’ in the dictionary is ‘carny’.  ‘Kot’ is accusative and masculine, and  ‘carny’ must agree with ‘kot’  and becomes ‘czarnego’.

This is different for plurals, female nouns and so on.

So finally, I’m starting to have an idea of how the language is built, or how to construct ‘small’ sentences.

Peace,

MF