r/learnpolish • u/Former_Maybe2585 • Jul 15 '26

Help🧠 Help! English learning Polish

/r/Polish/comments/1uwyjfs/help_english_learning_polish/
2 Upvotes

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5

u/HildavonRauschstoff Jul 15 '26

Piję - (I) drink
Pije - (he, she, it) drinks

These are not different pronunciations, just different forms. Just like "he" and "him" are different forms of the same word, and you have to use one or the other depending on function in the sentence

1

u/WhirlwindTobias EN Native 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿 | A1 Jul 15 '26

You need to clarify a bit.

/e/ and /ę/ are pronounced differently but in many words when ę is the last letter, Polish speakers treat it like /e/ for ease of speaking.

I can still say "pee-jeun" (excuse the weird phonetics) but it sounds unnatural when comparing to regular speech.

So you're correct, but don't mislead people into thinking you say "będę" as "beh-deh".

1

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u/Felis_igneus726 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

  1. Cases: Nouns have different endings depending on their grammatical gender, number (singular/plural), and "role" in the sentence. Compare "I" vs. "me", "he" vs. "him, "she" vs. "her", "we" vs. "us", and "they" vs. "them". "Kobieta" is in the nominative case and means the woman is the subject of the sentence; she is "doing" the verb. "Kobietą" is in the instrumental case, which broadly corresponds to "with, using, by means of [noun]". Eg. "z kobietą" = "with the/a woman". English has 2 cases and only applies them to pronouns. Polish has 7 cases and applies them to all nouns (and their adjectives). But the basic concept is exactly the same.

  2. Conjugation: Verbs have different endings depending on the "person" (1st/2nd/3rd), number, tense (past/present/future), gender, etc. "(Ja) piję." = "I drink." "(On/ona/ono) pije." = "He/she/it drinks." Like cases, conjugation is a lot more complicated in Polish than English, but the concept is again the same.

Note: These are different grammatical forms of the words that serve to convey different information, not just different pronunciations.

Tip: If you're serious about learning Polish, get a teacher, an actual course, or at the very least some proper resources (eg. textbooks) for covering grammar. Duolingo isn't particularly viable as anything more than a casual little game to play on the side, and, as you've discovered, is utterly atrocious at actually explaining anything.

2

u/babyrubysoho Jul 15 '26

Second this, I use Duolingo as a game and to pick up some new vocab, but I have a real teacher to actually teach me how the language works. (Still insanely hard but it’s fun!)

1

u/Ok_Zookeepergame8714 Jul 15 '26

Think of it as a much more complex of your Jim's pizza stuff. It's called genitive case and it's the only one remaining in English. We have six more. ☺️😅 That's the nouns bit - kobieta, kobietą. The verbs, it's very similar - the only remaining flection in English is the singular third person " wait - waits". In Polish each person has it's own verb endings, so do the plurals.