A while back Gary sent me an email, which for the life of me I can\u2019t find anywhere now \u2013 my mailbox self-destructed earlier this week and all my messages disappeared into the bottomless internet pit. But that\u2019s not what we\u2019re going to talk about today. Gary asked for a post about prepositions, and when my readers ask, I do as I\u2019m told.<\/p>\n
To be honest, I was happy, in an evil sort of way, that it\u2019s not just my fellow Poles who struggle with prepositions when learning a foreign language. Surprise, surprise, prepositions are an equal opportunity problem. Those pesky little words in Polish are just as confusing to foreigners as the foreign little words are to Poles.<\/p>\n
And because my big, fat \u201cGrammar of Contemporary Polish\u201d<\/em> is strangely silent on the subject (speaking of which, it\u2019s strangely silent on most issues that confuse Polish learners, but aren’t most grammar books like that?) we\u2019ll do it according to my very own method. Namely, we\u2019ll pick a preposition and beat it till it bleeds. Today\u2019s choice? W!<\/strong><\/p>\n Most dictionaries translate \u201cw<\/strong>\u201d as \u201cin.\u201d Some give such fancy explanations as \u201camid\u201d or \u201cinside\u201d or \u201cwithin\u201d. So far, so good. It\u2019s all true. But then the fun begins\u2026<\/p>\n Take this one, for example: And then, there\u2019s this:<\/p>\n But then:<\/p>\n And now this:<\/p>\n and so on\u2026<\/p>\n But wait, there\u2019s more!<\/p>\n See how much fun this is? You can basically pick any English preposition, and I\u2019m pretty sure there is a Polish equivalent with \u201cw<\/strong>\u201d somewhere out there. I\u2019m also pretty sure that if I really challenged my brain cells, I could come up with examples containing \u201cby\u201d and \u201cfor\u201d, too.<\/p>\n I was just reading all kinds of random \u201cw<\/strong>\u201d entries in a couple of Polish-English dictionaries on-line, and that\u2019s exactly how one of them translated \u201cw<\/strong>\u201d \u2013 as: in, on, at, by, for, within, inside, amid.<\/p>\n And now, if you excuse me, I have candy to hand out to small kids waiting at my door. After all, this is what you do w<\/strong> Halloween, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A while back Gary sent me an email, which for the life of me I can\u2019t find anywhere now \u2013 my mailbox self-destructed earlier this week and all my messages disappeared into the bottomless internet pit. But that\u2019s not what we\u2019re going to talk about today. Gary asked for a post about prepositions, and when…<\/p>\n
\n\u201cw przysz\u0142ym tygodniu<\/a><\/strong>\u201d means simply \u201cnext week\u201d
\nBut if you say \u201cin a week\u201d \u2013 in Polish it will be \u201cza tydzie\u0144<\/a><\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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\n<\/strong><\/li>\n\n
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