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Polish Grammar
Gender of nouns
Every noun is masculine, feminine or neuter. The gender does not depend on the meaning of nouns except for words denoting male/female animals/humans.It is quite easy to distinguish between masculine, feminine and neuter nouns because masculine nouns end with a consonant or (rare) with a vowel a or o, feminine nouns end with a (most of them) or with a consonant or (a few words only) with i, neuter nouns end with o, e, e or (rare) -um. Note that nouns do not decline for gender. They have a m/f/n form only.
Gender of adjectives
Adjectives decline for gender. You can recognize the gender and decline them using the following rule:masculine adjectives end with y or i,
feminine adjectives end with a
neuter adjectives end with e.
You may ask about masculine forms: how to guess what I should write i or y? If a stem of a masculine adjective ends with k or g then the next letter must be i not y (niebieski, not niebiesky). This i also appears in neuter forms (niebieskie). However there are some adjectives taking i, which stems do not end with k or g.
Forms of adjectives are determined by nouns. Adjectives must agree with their nouns in gender. If you describe a masculine noun you use masculine adjectives, feminine/neuter nouns take feminine/neuter adjectives. This grammatical fact is called an agreement or concord.
Negative sentences
If you want to change an affirmative sentence into a negative you simply put a particle nie before a predicate.Word order
Word order in Polish is less important than in English. It is inflection that plays the same part as strict word order in English.So, the way Polish words are arranged is not so important. However there are rules which tell us how to put words in the right order. For the time being you need to remember that:
the main pattern of affirmative sentences is subject + predicate + object (eg. Monika + jest + wysoka).
the main pattern of negative sentences is subject + nie + predicate + object (eg. Monika + nie + jest + wysoka), an adjective usually precedes a noun.
Even if basic word order in Polish is SVO, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context.
These sentences mean the same ("Ala has a cat"):
Ala ma kota
Ala kota ma
Kota ma Ala
Ma Ala kota
Kota Ala ma
Ma kota Ala
Yet only the first of these sounds natural in Polish, and others should be used for emphasis only, if at all. If apparent from context, you can drop the subject, object or even the verb:
Ma kota - can be used if it's obvious who is being talked about
Ma - answer for "Czy Ala ma kota?" ("Does Ala have a cat?")
Ala - answer for "Kto ma kota?" ("Who has a cat?")
Kota - answer for "Co ma Ala?" ("What does Ala have?")
Ala ma - answer for "Kto z naszych znajomych ma kota?" ("Which of our friends does have a cat?")
Note the marker "czy", which turns a sentence into a question, much as the French use "Est-ce que...".
There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object and rarely you know the object but not the subject. If the question was "Kto ma kota ?" (Who has a cat ?), the answer should be "Ala" alone, without a verb.
In particular, "ja" (I) and "ty" (you, singular), and also their plural equivalents "my" (we) and "wy" (you, plural), are almost always dropped.