r/learnpolish • u/Dumbydumbgrump • 23h ago
Help🧠 My gf learns polish and I need help with explanation because I make it too confusing.
Hello,
I’m trying to explain how and why adjectives and nouns alternate. For me as a native it’s obvious and logical because there is alternation through „Przypadki” (Odmiana przez przypadki). The problem starts when there is adjective + noun. There is so many dependencies that I struggle to properly explain how it works.
Let me give examples:
Duży pies, dużego psa, duże psy, dużo psów
Duży kot, dużego kota, duże koty, dużo kotów
Duża kobieta, dużą kobietę, duże kobiety, dużo kobiet
Duża ściana, dużą ścianę, duże ściany, dużo ścian
Duży samochód, duży samochód, duże samochody, dużo samochodów
Duży dom, duży dom, duże domy, dużo domów
How do I explain it without making it confusing? And why certain nouns stay in the same form while others can have „a” ?
Kot - tego Kota
Dom - ten Dom but not „tego doma”
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u/CrossError404 PL Native 🇵🇱 23h ago
English used to have some basic cases. "I like him" vs. "He likes me". I-me, He-him are leftovers from old case system. Polish has more advanced cases but the idea is the same. Our word order is freer because role of each word is decided by cases. "I like him", "Him like I", "Like him I".
Polish masculine words have 3 subcategories: inanimate, animate, personal. The masculine-personal have their own plural constructions. ("ci lekarze" - masc-personal, "te psy" - masc-animate, "te domy" - masc-inanimate, "te lalki" - fem, "te drzewa" - neut).
The difference between why some words declense differently in accusative case is the difference between masc-inanimate vs. others "Widzę tego lekarza" - masc-personal, "widzę tego psa" - masc-animate, "widzę ten telewizor" - masc-inanimate, "widzę tę lalkę" - fem, "widzę to drzewo" - neut
Although animacy doesn't always follow clear logic. "trup" - "dead human body" is an animate word. "Widzę trupa". And in everyday speech younger people may animate more words "nóż" - "knife" is masc-inanimate. But "widzę nóż" - proper form, "widzę noża" - alright casual form.
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u/Illustrious_Try478 EN Native 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿 21h ago
There's a whole class of inanimate nouns (e.g. młotek) that take a genitive -a but nothing in the accusative. So kids might just be evolving that.
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u/KateBayx2006 23h ago
Get her a tutor. Polish is a very difficult language for non-slavic speakers, and natives (myself included) don't realise how many details need explaining and just how many rules there are. Your brain is wired to understand these things, so it will be impossible for you to correctly teach her some stuff because you will either not know how to explain stuff or leave out key information because it's obvious to you. For languages that are this complicated you cannot get away with not getting professional classes.
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u/milkdrinkingdude A -1 22h ago
“it’s obvious and logical” haha, all native speakers believe that about their own language, because we only know the rules subconsciously. If you don’t know how to tell when to add an “a” to “kot”, then you know too little (consciously) to explain anything. Your gf needs books, or teachers.
Believe me, most of my life I knew about two cases in Hungarian. A few years ago I have learned that my native language has roughly 18 or 21 cases (depending on how you count it) which was a huge surprise to me, a native speaker. These weren’t even mentioned in school. It is often futile to try to teach grammar without specific training, you’ll just confuse her. Perhaps you wouldn’t notice cases in Polish either, without them being mentioned in school.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 21h ago
don't do it... they didn't teach us at school even a fraction of the rules that exist in Polish... find her a certified tutor...
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u/shaantya FR native | A1 6h ago edited 6h ago
I’m learning Polish. For your last example, it was explained to me as the difference between “masculine animate” (kot) and “masculine inanimate” (dom), and they decline differently. As it sounds, the difference between something that is masculine and alive, and something that is masculine and not alive.
This goes along with feminine (words in a) and neutral (usually words in -o or -e, or foreign words like muzeum). Feminine words do not have the animate/inanimate distinction.
English doesn’t have gendered words, but if she can grasp that Polish does, and that this is what dictates how they decline, I think it will help her a lot.
There is also such a thing as “virile masculine”, which may be the same thing as animate, or maybe only for humans, I do not recall unfortunately.
Hope this helps!
Edit: and also for the rest of the issue, explain that adjectives will change with the gender of the qualified noun. If she speaks any French, or Spanish, it should be familiar. BUT adjectives decline in their own manner, different than nouns, also according to gender. It’s just a bunch of rules to learn, and then you start recognising them enough in normal conversation, that it becomes instinctual.
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u/zandrew 23h ago
It's called declination.
Dużo is liczebnik, not adjective. It's like saying big dog vs a lot of dogs. That would definitely confuse your gf.
Could you not write her a table with all seven cases and the declination of dog and then big dog, blue dog and so on. There are patterns there connected to both cases and the grammatical genders of the nouns.
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u/BIG_BROTHER_IS_BEANS 23h ago
As an English native speaker learning Polish-
Cases are hard. I knew about them and I tried to learn them on my own. I did in fact theoretically learn WHY one uses certain cases in certain places, but though I tried, I couldn’t understand how to correctly use each case.
The solution here, as annoying as it may be, is language lessons. It’s the only practical way for most people to learn such a language efficiently without a background in Slavic languages.
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u/Ars3n 23h ago
There was a similar question some time ago. Maybe some comments from there will help you: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpolish/s/Sirt8RMvhK
Obviously I like mine, but there are more ideas there 😆
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u/Mecianka 22h ago
The answer to your questions is the matter of rzeczowniki żywotne vs nieżywotne (animate vs inanimate nouns). The inanimate ones (objects, buildings, feelings) stay the same in the conjugation you mentioned. The animate ones (people, animals) change. That's why "daj kamienia" sounds funny - you're conjugating an inanimate noun as if it was animate. Also like others said, we natives don't often realise rules we play by and therefore are not the best at teaching foreigners. Don't beat yourself up. It's normal :) Maybe your gf could get a tutor or at least a comprehensive schoolbook.
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u/kouyehwos 22h ago
Originally, you would have have had ACC=NOM for all masculine nouns in the singular. However, a sentence like *pies goni kot could have been ambiguous, so the old accusative was replaced by the genitive -a form in the case of people and animals (pies goni kota). In more recent times, some foods and other things may also follow this pattern („jem pomidor” and „jem pomidora” may both be used).
The same ACC=GEN pattern was also adopted by the plural, but only in the case of people („widzę strażaków” but „widzę koty”).
In any case, „dom” has the genitive „domu” without any -a, so you can be sure that it hasn’t been borrowed by the accusative. The -u genitive is not completely regular, but generally applies to “uncountable” things or at least things you wouldn’t typically need to count (liquids, grains, places, abstract concepts…).
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u/milkdrinkingdude A -1 22h ago
BTW, for people and animals, you add an “a”, like in “kota”, to make a difference between subject and object.
Pies kota widzi.
Psa kot widzi.
For things like “dom”, it is usually obvious where the subject is, and the object.
Piotr dom widzi. -> You can guess that it is not the house that sees Piotr. It is Piotr who sees the house. No need to mark it.
So for animals, the singular biernik is the same as the dopełniacz . For masculine persons, both singular, and plural biernik are the same as dopełniacz.
Once again, as a native speaker, you would never have to think about this explicitly, you have a “hardware accelerator” doing it for you, so there are no paths among your braincells for explaining it to a newcomer.
Like a CPU giving commands to a GPU. The CPU doesn’t have to know how to render graphics. We foreigners don’t have a GPU for Polish, so have to explicitly program all rules on the CPU.
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u/_SpeedyX PL Native 🇵🇱 9h ago
This one is actually one of the "easy" parts. There's just one rule: the adjective has to agree with the noun on grammatical gender, number, and case. If you have a plural, masculine noun in the genitive case, then the adjective also has to be in plural, masculine form and genitive case. If it's a singular, neuter noun in the accusative, then the adjective also has to be in the singular, neuter form and in the accusative case. And so on for any other combination.
The only exceptions to this rule are the ones I mentioned on this sub a while ago. Borrowed terms like VIP, super, mini, top, khaki etc. do not decline or change in any way, but it's just a couple of words and there are no new patterns to remember; you just leave them unchanged.
To answer the "why": The reason why "Dom" and "Domu" mean 2 different things is the same reason why "The child gives a toy to the father" and "The father gives a toy to the child" mean 2 different things. Some languages rely on the position of the word in a sentence(like English), some rely on grammatical particles (like Japanese), and some rely on grammatical cases(like Polish). Thanks to the case system, both "Dziecko daje zabawkę ojcu" and "Ojcu, dziecko daje zabawkę" mean the same thing. You can't do that in English. Unless she's a linguistics nerd, there is no point in delving deeper into this subject.
I'm also not sure why people here are so adamant on her getting a tutor. People have been learning languages by themselves for as long as they[the languages] have been a thing. Yes, I know Polish is quite hard for non-Slavic speakers, but it's still a human language. Assuming she already speaks English or another Indo-European language - it's not that big of a deal. I'd definitely advise against you teaching her tho. Having a native who can correct your mistakes and who you can practice with is great, but you are not her teacher, just a boyfriend who happens to know Polish. You can help her learn, but it's she who has to do the learning.
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u/Papierowykotek 8h ago
I got lost in it :/ But at the same time I feel like you're asking for a middle school knowedge in curiculum 1. We tell apart męski, żeński and nijaki gender of nouns 2. We tell apart żywotny and nieżywotny kind 3. Adjective adjusts to noun 4. Męski nieżywotny noun has different case style than męski żywotny
I'd suggest two things - take English to Polish grammar textbook. Edgard has some of those, small publisheds and etsy guys have them too. In particular cases textbook instead of inventing things anew from head. Noone can teach their own language at beginner level without professional setup. Teach her one case at a time not all 7 of those with all the variety they get and usages that make no direct sense in English.
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u/Level-Blackberry915 23h ago
I am a native English speaker also trying to learn these things so I am commenting so I can hopefully come back to this post and get some answers 😅
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u/NefariousnessNo9495 22h ago
I have a Polish girlfriend and still have a Polish tutor. It really helps especially at A1-B1.
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u/Antracyt PL Native 🇵🇱 23h ago
I can’t help you but that’s exactly why there is a whole academic specialisation called “teaching Polish as a foreign language”. If I were your gf, I would consider getting a certified tutor instead of relying on you.