Polish Language Blog

My friend called me today and that should be good news, right? But it wasn’t. The poor woman was very stressed and urgently requested my help. You see, she was applying for a visa to one of those countries that still require a woman to provide information about her male guardian, either a father or a husband. So my friend dutifully filled out the visa application form, included her photos, paid the fees and waited. And then waited some more. Finally today she got a letter stating that her visa application was rejected due to her name (as printed in her passport) not matching with the name of her male guardian (father).

She doesn’t live in Poland, and apparently, the officials at the Embassy of The Very Strange Country over there were not familiar with the peculiarities of Polish surnames. And I don’t blame them. Even in the not so strange countries, it’s sometimes hard for the administrative automatons to comprehend the fact that some Polish last names can have both a feminine and a masculine form and some don’t. And that some last names decline (grammatically speaking, of course) and on certain documents they can be printed in different grammatical cases. And that with some last names it’s only the guys’ forms that decline, but not the girls’. Really.

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The distinction between “this” and “that” is more or less clear in English. Or at least I’ve always thought so. But as one of our readers has pointed out, while “this” is easier to grasp when translated into a foreign language, things can get really goofy with “that”.

Fortunately, I can assure you that people who learn English have exactly the same problem, but in the opposite direction. And just look at “that” in the previous sentence. It’s a different “that” from when talking about “that house is nice”.

See? In English “that” is used just about everywhere and for just about everything.

Translating all those “thats” into Polish can be a real pain. In fact, I’ve been scratching my head and debating how to do it in the least painful way for the past couple of days.

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Ok, so today I’m supposed to tell you how to figure out the gender when it comes to plural nouns and adjectives. But first, we need to talk just a tiny little but about those plural nouns and their genders.

You see, those plural nouns can be confusing. They are even to me. And I should know this stuff, I’m Polish. But even so, I sometimes have to stop and think about it.

That we have three genders in singular you know already. However, in plural, those three genders become two. And they’re no longer so nicely organized into masculine, feminine, and neuter. Oh no! Polish can’t be THAT easy!

Instead, our plural nouns have two bizarre genders called:

- personal masculine
- everything else.

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