Last night I went to my Polish evening class, which is tends to be light on grammar and big on talking, but last night we discussed the genitive case for singular Polish nouns.

I haven’t found many easy Polish grammar resources on the internet, and the ones I have come across have been too complicated , so here is what I learnt.

It is the genitive singular (nouns) made easy.

Polish has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. The genitive is different depending on the gender of the noun being used. Now, this is difficult to learn and remember so  for each gender you learn a sample sentence illustrating how it is formed.

Negation, in Polish, requires the genitive, and so each of these sample sentences will need the genitive. There are three genders, three nouns and three example sentences.

Let us start with the feminine. Kawa is the word for coffee. It is feminine.  The genitive of kawa is kawy.

Ja nie lubię kawy.  ‘I don’t like coffee’.

And now the neuter. Mleko ‘milk’ is a neuter word. The genitive of mleko is mleka.

Ja nie lubię mleka.

And now the masculine. Brat ‘brother’ is masculine.

Ja nie lubię brata.

So, feminine nouns change the ‘a‘ to ‘y‘, masculine nouns ending in a consonant  add an ‘a‘ and neuter nouns change the ‘o‘ to ‘a‘.

This is a good start (apparently) with one caveat. Masculine nouns ending in a consonant (e.g. brat) will either add an ‘a‘ or … ‘u‘. This wasn’t mentioned in our class, and I can only assume that we were being protected by our teacher from overload, and that more information will be forthcoming next week. I’ll keep you posted.

Unfortunately, you have to learn the correct ending as it is not possible to guess predict in advance which it will be. E.g. The genitive of the noun adres is adresu.

And some are completely irregular.

Nevertheless this is a good start.

‘ve added this mainly so that when I loose the sheet of paper I scrawled my notes on I still have somewhere to refer back to. As do you, dear reader who is learning Polish 😉

Peace.

MF