Learn how to ask about your possessions
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| 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 age using the verb mieć, “to have.” |
| You can probably guess that mieć can also be used to talk about things you own. That will be the topic of this lesson. |
| Czy masz samochód? “Do you have a car?” |
| [slowly] Czy masz samochód? |
| Let’s take a closer look at this question. |
| Czy indicates a question and has no meaning. Then there’s masz, which means “you have” and finally samochód, which means “a car” . |
| How to ask this question in a formal situation? I’m sure you remember two words that are needed to do that! Yes! It’s Pan, for addressing a man and Pani for addressing a woman. These two sentences will look like this: |
| Czy ma Pan samochód? |
| Czy ma Pani samochód? |
| So if you *do* have a car, how can you answer this question? |
| Just turn the verb mieć into the 1st person—it’s really simple! You did it during the last lesson to talk about your age, remember? |
| “How old are you?” is Ile masz lat? |
| And we answered with Mam... |
| So in this case we say Mam samochód. “I have a car.” |
| [slowly] Mam samochód. |
| You can also shorten the answer by dropping the noun. So for example a classmate wants to borrow a pen from you. He may ask, Czy masz długopis? Which is “Do you have a pen?” If you do, you just say Mam, and hand it to him. |
| What if you want to borrow something from someone you don’t know very well? I’m sure you already know what we have to do. |
| If we want to borrow a pen from a lady we would ask Czy ma Pani długopis? “Do you have a pen, ma’am?”. And then if we want to borrow a pen from a man, we would ask Czy ma Pan długopis? “Do you have a pen, sir?” |
| Now it’s time for Joanna’s Insights. |
| If you want to sound natural you can skip the word czy in almost every question. Polish people skip many words when speaking, because without them we still can understand each other easily. When it comes to questions, just use the right intonation and we will know that you are asking us something. Say for example that you want to ask “Do you have a dog?”. The right way to ask is Czy masz psa?, but if you use the same intonation but just skip the word czy we will get a question Masz psa?. Please remember that intonation is very important here, because if you forget about it, it will sound like a statement - Masz psa, “You have a dog.” |
| In recent lessons, we have learned about the verbs być, “to be”, and mieć, “to have”. |
| Next time we’ll learn how to use these two verbs in their negative forms in order to say “I’m not” and “I don’t have”. |
| See you in the next Polski 3 minuty lesson. Papa! |
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