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Lesson Transcript

Cześć! Jestem Joanna. Hi! I’m Joanna.
Welcome to PolishPod101.com’s “Polski w 3 minuty”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Polish.
In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verb “to be” in Polish, być.
When you meet a new person in Poland, they might ask you Skąd jestes? which means "Where are you from?"
skąd means “from where”
jesteś is a conjugated form of być, which means “to be”
So we have very simple question.
Skąd jesteś?
[slowly] Skąd jesteś?
If *we* ask this question to a person much older than us, or a person we don’t know very well, we have to use the already well-known words Pan or Pani.
Now please try making this sentence formal by adding Pan.
Did you get it? Now let’s check:
Skąd Pan jest? Did you get it right?
And if we are talking to a lady we will ask:
Skąd Pani jest?
Easy, isn’t it?
Answering this question isn’t difficult either! You just say Jestem, which means "I am", then ‘z’, which means “from” and finally the name of the country you come from.
For example: Jestem z Anglii.
I am from England.
[slowly] Jestem z Anglii.
Just replace “USA” with your own country.
“I’m from America” is Jestem z USA.
"I’m from Germany" is Jestem z Niemiec.
"I’m from Italy" is Jestem z Włoch.
“I’m from France” Jestem z Francji.
Be careful, because country names used here are conjugated forms, which are a little bit different from basic forms. For example.
England in Polish is Anglia. But if you put it in the sentence we practiced just a moment ago, we have to say Anglii.
Now it’s time for Joanna’s Insights.
In Poland we don’t use names of nationalities very often, except maybe for nationalities like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French or German, but mostly in situations when we talk about a big group of people. Instead, we ask “Where are you from”? Skąd jesteś?, which we learned today. And we answer using the country’s name, not our nationality name.
In this lesson we learned how to talk about where you come from.
Next time we’ll continue to study the verb być and we'll see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in Polish? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Polski w 3 minuty lesson. Papa!!

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