# Poland for a vacation - any thoughts?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poland-for-a-vacation-any-thoughts/550609>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [August 18, 2010, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poland-for-a-vacation-any-thoughts/550609 "2010-08-18T11:44:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\
**Post date:** [August 27, 2010, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poland-for-a-vacation-any-thoughts/550609/21 "2010-08-27T16:52:30Z")

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> [@purplehorseshoe](#):
>
> My Polish is rusty now but I used to be fluent enough to pass for native, so if I can help you out, I’d be happy to do what I can. You could start a thread, I guess - sounds like \*\*pulykamell \*\*knows a thing or three as well. Noun endings trip me up the most, and gave me away when otherwise my accent and vocab was in top shape.
> 
> That said, I’ll share a story about an American college student I met in Lublin. Initially, he spoke absolutely no Polish. First he learned one key word: _piwo_. (“Beer.”) Then - a breakthrough! - he learned another word: _dwa_. (“Two.”) This helped him order a beer for himself AND a lady! 🙂 Softening feminine influences being what they are, he eventually learned yet another word: _prosze_. (“Please.”)
> 
> I believe that was the full extent of the language that he absorbed, but to him, it was all he needed to know: “Two beers, please.” Got him drunk, got him laid. Dude had priorities, ya know?

Mine is rusty as all hell. Polish was the first language I learned (growing up in a Polish-only speaking household in Chicago), and then when I started socializing with the neighborhood kids and watching TV, that’s when my English came in. Or perhaps you can say I learned them concurrently.

Anyhow, I primarily know its grammar by ear, and this would be the biggest hurdle in teaching it for me. For example, in the phrase above for two beers, it would correctly be: _Dwa piwa proszę_ or _dwa razy piwo, proszę_. But I had to double check, even though that’s how I would say it, because I don’t know the formal rules, just what sounds right. The grammar is a real pain in the ass. Correctly declining numbers are especially tricky. Polish has _seventeen forms_ for the number two, depending on its grammatical function in the sentence and the word it is modifying (if it is being used as an adjective.) Here’s how “One/Two/Five windows” would decline as the subject of a sentence: jedno okno, dwa okna, pięć okien. What a pain in the ass.

The good news is, getting the case system wrong isn’t going to really hamper your ability to be understood. It _may_ hamper your comprehension a bit if you don’t know all the forms, especially for shorter words where you have less data to go on and a grammatical change in form is more likely to interfere with your recognition of the unadorned (nominative singular) form.

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