Learn how to use adjectives
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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 this lesson, we will learn about Polish adjectives and how to use them properly. |
| You will see that for adjectives, things in Polish are not as easy as in English. |
| The basic rule in order to use adjectives correctly is that in Polish, adjectives always have to agree with the noun they describe. So if the noun is masculine, the adjective has to be masculine too. |
| Let’s start with an example - To jest świetna gra - "It is a great game." |
| [slowly] To jest świetna gra. |
| Here the noun we describe, gra, is a feminine singular word, so the adjective świetna is also in the feminine singular form. |
| Let’s see the same sentence with a masculine subject - To jest bardzo dobry bar, "It’s a very good bar" |
| to jest stands for “it is”, then jest, 3rd person form of the verb być, bardzo stands for “very” and dobry is a masculine form of the adjective “good”. And finally bar is “a bar”. |
| Now let’s see the rules for making masculine and feminine forms of adjectives. |
| If you learn Polish adjectives, the basic form given will be always masculine. Then we just need to make a small change at the end of the word to make it feminine. |
| We can divide adjectives in 2 groups. The 1st group will be adjectives that end with the vowel Y, “Y”. I’ll give you masculine and then feminine form of a few adjectives as an example: |
| “cold” - zimny - zimna |
| “hot” - gorący - gorąca |
| “difficult” - trudny - trudna |
| “beautiful” - piękny - piękna |
| “complicated” - skomplikowany - skomplikowana |
| “red” - czerwony - czerwona |
| Did you notice what happened here? |
| Every time we made the feminine form, we changed the last vowel “y” into “a”, in Polish - A. |
| Let’s do the same thing for the 2nd group: |
| “cheap” - tani - tania |
| “expensive” - drogi - droga |
| “ugly” - brzydki - brzydka |
| “short” - krótki - krótka |
| “blue” - niebieski - niebieska |
| Here the adjectives end with the vowel “i”, in Polish - i . To change masculine into feminine we have to change the vowel “i” into the vowel “a”, in Polish - A. |
| Now let’s practice neuter forms. First I’ll give you masculine and then neuter form. |
| cold - zimny - zimne |
| hot - gorący - gorące |
| difficult - trudny - trudne |
| beautiful - piękny - piękne |
| complicated - skomplikowany - skomplikowane |
| red - czerwony - czerwone |
| What we did here was changing the ‘y’ sound into ‘e’ at the end of every word. |
| Now let’s do the same thing for the 2nd group of adjectives: |
| cheap - tani - tanie |
| expensive - drogi - drogie |
| ugly - brzydki - brzydkie |
| short - krótki - krótkie |
| blue - niebieski - niebieskie |
| Here the only thing we have to do is adding ‘e’ at the end of the masculine form. |
| There are two basic patterns for using adjectives, which differ in the order of the words. For example: |
| “This is a cheap dinner.” How would we say this in Polish? Let me give you a hint. “Dinner” in Polish is obiad and it’s a masculine noun. It’s: To jest tani obiad. |
| [slowly] To jest tani obiad. |
| We can say it also this way “This dinner is cheap”, Ten obiad jest tani. |
| [slowly] Ten obiad jest tani. |
| The pattern is exactly the same as in English. |
| Let’s practice a little bit more. |
| If you want to say "My garden is big" you will say Mój ogród jest duży, as ogród is masculine. |
| But if you want to say "My bedroom is big" you will say Moja sypialnia jest duża – you change the “y” into “a” in the end of the adjective. |
| Let’s try with one more sentence. |
| “That car is expensive” will be Tamten samochód jest drogi. We used drogi, because the noun samochód is masculine. |
| But if we say this about a bag, which is feminine, it will be Tamta torebka jest droga. |
| Now it’s time for Joanna’s Insights. |
| If you want to insist on an adjective in Polish, you can put the word naprawdę before the adjective. As in naprawdę piękny, which is "really beautiful" or naprawdę smaczny to say "really tasty." You can also use the word that you already know - bardzo, which means very. Then we will get bardzo piękny, “very beautiful” or bardzo smaczny, “very tasty”. |
| In this lesson, we learned how to properly use singular forms of adjectives in Polish and how to agree them correctly with nouns. |
| Next time we’ll learn how to use plural forms of Polish adjectives. |
| See you in our next Polski w 3 minuty lesson! |
| Do zobaczyska! |
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