Attempting discourse in the Polish language can be terrifying and humiliating, but fortunately for you most Poles, particularly young people, have a healthy command of the English language...

First the bad news: Polish is considered one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to master. Spiked with such linguistic monstrosities as chrząszcz (beetle), źdźbło (blade of grass), and szczęście (happiness), it is also a declension minefield, with no fewer than seven cases to keep track of. Think wódka (vodka) is always wódka? Nope. Depending on how you use it in a sentence, it might take the form wódki, wódkę, wódce, wódką, or wódko - and that’s sticking to the singular only. Adjectives are even worse, with the seven cases multiplied by three singular genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter - each noun in Polish is assigned one of these) and two plural genders (female only vs male/mixed) in a decisively non-binary situation (still with us?). And just to round it out, verbs also change depending on the gender of the speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken about.


1/4