A teraz, coś całkiem innego . . .
Last weekend was an important milestone for me: it’s been a year since I started studying Polish. Last spring, my grad student housing closed due to COVID-19, and my girlfriend and I evacuated to her parents’ house in New Jersey. Her parents grew up in Poland, and Polish is the language they speak at home. To better communicate with my girlfriend’s family, and because I had free time during lockdown, I decided to learn Polish.1 My goals were to be able to keep up a conversation, and to read Stanisław Lem’s books without translation.
Perhaps I was too optimistic after having an easy time with Spanish in high school. Although I have made considerable progress,2 it turns out that learning Polish is not simple! To illustrate why, let’s look at an example: the number system.
The Polish Numbers
Cardinal Numbers
People may say that French does numbers oddly,3 but Polish is truly strange. The issue is not so much the numbers themselves, as how they interact with the case system. As a bit of background, Polish has seven grammatical cases,4 and five genders.5 Nouns must be declined to form the case required by the sentence, and adjectives must also change to match the nouns in number, gender, and case. Likewise, numbers must also agree.
For example, unlike in English and Spanish, in Polish no forms of the word “two” are the same in the sentence below:6
English: Two men, two women, and two children gave two apples to two teachers in two rooms.
Spanish: Dos hombres, dos mujeres, y dos niños dieron dos manzanas a dos maestros en dos salas.
Polish: Dwaj mężczyźni, dwie kobiety, i dwoje dzieci dali dwa jabłka dwóm nauczycielom w dwóch pokojach.
When I showed my girlfriend this example for proofreading, she told me that nobody actually says “dwaj mężczyźni”, and a different form, “dwóch mężczyzn”, is preferred.7 I looked this up, and it turns out that it’s extra weird. “Dwóch mężczyzn” is actually a singular neuter phrase for the purpose of verbs! For example:
Two men ate an apple.
Dwaj mężczyźni zjedli jabłko. (zjedli = masculine plural conjugation8)
Dwóch mężczyzn zjadło jabłko. (zjadło = singular neuter conjugation)
This is similar to what happens with numbers that end in “pięć” and above.9 These numbers will switch the case of the following noun to Genitive, if it otherwise would have been in Nominative or Accusative. For example:
English: Three black dogs, four black dogs, five black dogs
Polish: Trzy czarne psy, cztery czarne psy, pięć czarnych psów
This makes things really confusing, especially in more complicated sentences. And as with the “two men” example, the overall phrase switches to singular neuter, but only for the purpose of verbs, not for demonstratives, leading to situations where the verb seemingly disagrees with the other parts of the sentence.
For example, in English we would say, “These five dogs eat a sandwich.” The Polish translation is “Tych pięć psów je kanapkę.” Translated literally, this would be “These five of dogs eats a sandwich.” This is so complicated that it’s literally the topic of academic research.
Ordinal numbers
Besides cardinal numbers, there are also the ordinal numbers (e.g. first, second, third), which are treated as adjectives. Here I’m giving the masculine nominative forms:
Pierwszy, drugi, trzeci, czwarty, piąty . . .
It’s not any worse than the cardinal numbers, but for numbers above 20, I always get thrown off. For example, in English we say “twenty-third”, but in Polish it is “dwudziesty trzeci” which is equivalent to “twentieth-third”.
Collective numbers
Finally, there are “collective numbers” used for animate neuter plurals, groups of mixed gender, some (but not all) body parts, and pluralia tantum.10
Dwoje, troje, czworo, pięcioro . . .
These have no analogs in English, and exist solely to confuse people learning Polish.
Conclusions
When I asked my girlfriend how she knows which words to use, she shrugged and told me, “I just say what feels right.” Apparently this all makes sense if you grow up speaking Polish. As for me, I can figure out which Polish numeral I need if I’m writing a blog post, but I’m hopelessly far from being able to do this in a real-time conversation.
The number system is a particularly complex part of Polish grammar, but it’s far from the only one. Some days I think that “overloading” in object-oriented programming was inspired by the Polish prepositions.11 Ultimately, grammatical “rules” are just an attempt to impose structure on an evolved, highly complex language.
Although Polish still feels truly foreign to me, I guess the good part is that I don’t need to have perfect grammar to make myself understood. After a year of study, I’m starting to be able to have conversations with native speakers, although half the sentences I say are “Nie rozumiem.” or “Proszę mów wolniej.”
Hey, at least I’m not learning Japanese.
There was an additional personal component too, in that some of my own ancestors were Polish, although Poland was not a country when they came to the United States.
I’ve been doing DuoLingo, supplemented with reading Stanisław Lem’s Cyberiada, and pestering my girlfriend for help until her patience runs out.
E.g. soixante, soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt-dix. Note that both French and Polish use the long scale for numbers 10^9 and above.
Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative, vocative.
Feminine, neuter, masculine inanimate, masculine animate non-virile, masculine virile.
For easy comparison I’ve kept the word order in the Polish sentence the same as English, but it is flexible to some extent.
This might be a dialect thing.
In Polish, verb conjugation depends on the gender of the subject. Yes, this is confusing.
For example, eleven = jedenaście would change to Genitive, but twenty-one = dwadzieścia jeden ends in “jeden” so it doesn’t change to Genitive.
Nouns with no singular form, like “pants” in English. An example in Polish is “drzwi”, which means either “door”, but is always plural. This leads to the odd phrase, “jedne drzwi”, which contains the plural form of the number 1.
The best example of this is probably “za”.
Re: "It’s not any worse than the cardinal numbers, but for numbers above 20, I always get thrown off. For example, in English we say “twenty-third”, but in Polish it is “dwudziesty trzeci” which is equivalent to “twentieth-third”."
Remember it stops applying for hundreds, thousands and above. It's a common error to say "dwutysięczny piąty" (2000th+5th) instead of "dwa tysiące piąty" (2000+5th), the latter being the correct one, when you refer to year 2005. Or any year after 2000, which is the only one you refer to as "dwutysięczny" (2000th).
But hey, if natives can't get it right why should foreigners :D I'm kind of a descriptivist myself and imo polish is overly complicated, with redundant letters (we could do without ż or ó, we have rz and u) with rules natives can't stick to. I understand if learning weird languages is your hobby or if you have a partner/family member who is a native, but I feel sorry for any foreigner who 'had to' learn it.
> This ["dwaj mężczyźni" vs. "dwóch mężczyzn"] might be a dialect thing.
I think you may be right: I asked a native-speaker relative of mine (from Warsaw), who said that both "dwaj mężczyźni" and "dwóch mężczyzn" are correct and sound natural.
> Some days I think that “overloading” in object-oriented programming was inspired by the Polish prepositions.
Some other languages with noun cases do this too, e.g. Greek πρός has a different meaning with each case except the nominative and vocative: πρός τινος (with the genitive, "from someone, [given, etc.] by someone"), πρός τινι (with the dative, "near someone"), πρός τινα (with the accusative, "towards someone") (according to https://logeion.uchicago.edu/%CF%80%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82 ).