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.

I suppose we should start with the easiest “that” of all – the demonstrative pronoun. Which is when you point at something and say “not this, THAT!”
As in English, in Polish there is also a distinction between “this” and “that”.
Let’s try to add a noun to see how it works in action.

• ten facet = this guy (masculine personal)
• ta kobieta = this woman (feminine)
• to drzewo = this tree (neuter) (audio)

And now see what happens when we switch “this” for “that”:

• tamten facet = that guy
• tamta kobieta = that woman
• tamto drzewo = that tree (audio)

This is the most basic equivalent of “that” in Polish. All three versions of “this” in Polish morphed into three versions (gender dependent) of “that”.

• ten → tamten (this → that for singular masculine nouns)
• ta → tamta (this → that for singular feminine nouns) and
• to → tamto (this → that for singular neuter nouns) (audio)

Of course, things are never that (and here I’ve just used another “that”) cut and dry when it comes to languages. Sometimes “that” in English can be translated into either ten, ta or to in Polish.

Imagine your best friend just spent a ridiculous amount of money on something utterly useless. I don’t know about you, but my first question would be:

• what do you need that for? – do czego ci to potrzebne? (audio)

Here “that” would be translated as “to”.

Or somebody is banging on your door and you even though mildly irritated still very politely ask:

• who is that? – kto to?

Or your spouse magically read your mind and gave you exactly what you were dreaming of:

• That is exactly what I wanted. – To dokładnie czego chciałem (past tense, first person singular, masculine)/ chciałam (past tense, first person singular, feminine). (audio)

And by the way, in both of those sentences above, there’s no need to translate “is” into Polish, “is” is implied and understood.

So that was the easiest “that”. There are several more uses of it, which unfortunately results in several more ways it can be translated into Polish. We’ll discuss all of them, no worries. In bite-size pieces.

All Polish from this post is here in one big audio file.