The benefits of language learning

czyli: dlaczego warto uczyć się języów

Polish grammar

Polish is a highly inflected language, with relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO). There are no articles, and subject pronouns are often dropped.

Nouns may belong to three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. A distinction is also made between animate and inanimate masculine nouns in the singular, and between masculine personal and non-personal nouns in the plural. 

There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative.

Adjectives agree with nouns in terms of gender, case and number. Attributive adjectives most commonly precede the noun, although in certain cases, especially in fixed phrases (like język polski, "Polish (language)"), the noun may come first.

Verbs are of imperfective or perfective aspect, often occurring in pairs. Conjugated verb forms agree with their subject in terms of person, number, and (in the case of past tense and subjunctive/conditional forms) gender.

Yes-no questions (both direct and indirect) are formed by placing the word czy at the start. 

Negation uses the word nie, before the verb or other item being negated; nie is still added before the verb even if the sentence also contains other negatives such as nigdy ("never") or nic ("nothing").

(source: Wikipedia)

What are the hardest languages to learn?

From VOXY

Nie jest źle:)

Lost in Translation by Lera Boroditsky

'Lost in Translation' by Lera Boroditsky is an interesting article about how the languages we speak affect the way we think. You can read it here, on The Wall Street Journal website.

Given below is a short extract from the article. Fascinating!

Some findings on how language can affect thinking:
* Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
*Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
*The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
*In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase."


'The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

I would be extremely interested to find out about your own experience with the Polish way of thinking.