User:Stan88

What's difficult about the language pair polish <--> english ?

Main problems :

A)

Adding endings to lemmas is not sufficient.

Often some letter inside lemma changes when inflecting by cases or people

For example :

koło(circle) : I don't love circles -> Ja nie kocham kół

Some letters like 'o' or 'e' or 'a' are likely to change to 'ó','ę','ą'.

It is called alternation and it is caused by apophony.

B)

Pronouns often change when inflecting by cases, people and genders.

Ja - Me (generally)

Się - Me (when someone do sth sometimes "się" should be added after a verb, like in french)

Mój - Mine (it inflects further as adjective so Moje, Moja, Mojego, Mojej, Moją are some possible inflexions of Mój)

Mnie - Me (When you do something for someone and it depends on him, you should add this)

C)

No = Nie when added to adjectives, nouns, participles is often joined.

So "Not careful" would be nie + troskliwy = nietroskliwy

And "Not religious" would be nie + religijny = niereligijny

But "Not for smokers" would be nie + dla palaczy = nie dla palaczy (with space)

D)

There are 11 types of conjugation of verbs and the type of conjugation often depends on a past lemma of this verb.

E)

According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_grammar#Syntax

Polish is a pro-drop language :

Subject pronouns are frequently dropped.

For example: ma kota (literally "has a cat") may mean "he/she/it has a cat".

It is also possible to drop the object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context.

For example, ma ("has") or nie ma ("has not") may be used as an affirmative or negative answer to a question "does... have...?".

It is very important part of the language and it is not the old-fashioned way to express yourself.