Cases (I)

In my experience, one of the trickiest aspects of the Polish language is the fact that (almost all) words change depending on the gramatical context. Technically this is called inflection, and Polish is an uber-inflected language.

Of course inflection happens in English also, such as most words geting an '-s' suffix to denote the plural (dog >> dogs), and most verbs gaining '-ed' for the past tense (learn >> learned), but the changes in Polish words are both more common and more profound.

A practical example: You study your vocabulary and learn the word miasto (town/city). Now very proud of yourself you expect to at least know when someone is talking about the city in the future. Then somebody says 'I'll eat something in town' to you (Zjem coś na mieście), you have no idea what they mean (You'll eat something in space?).

In our example, miasto changed case - from the nominative case (which is what you will find in a dictionary) to the instrumenal case. Cases are there to express the relationship between words (as word order does in english)*. Cases are also, in my opinion, greatly responsible for the rubiks-cube complexity of Polish grammar, which effectively requires you to memorise three-dimensional tables to figure out how to properly form (or interpret) words.

I don't want to suggest that case is the only thing causing inflection - words are also inflected to denote gender, tense, and plurality among other things, but it's easily the most complicated factor. Perhaps Germans, Non-Polish Slavs and members of the Clergy don't find it quite so baffling as I do.

I'll come back to each case individually at some point, but for now lets just say there are 7 of them:

Nominative (Dictionary form)
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Instrumental
Locative
Vocative

Intro

Hi, I'm an English guy living in Poland. I've been learning Polish on and off for about a year now, and haven't made anywhere near as much progress as I would have liked. Partly this is due to me being lazy, partly due to there being not enough time in the day, but mainly (I like to think) because it's a pretty trickly language.

I will try to share some of my frustrations, tips and experiences, and I hope that this blog, if it ever gets beyond two posts, will be of some interest to other English speakers who have decided, for whatever reason, to learn Polish. Perhaps someone will even find it useful! But let's not get carried away...