Chapter 01 · what you are dealing with
What a verb is
and what it must decide
A Polish verb carries more information in one word than an English one, and it decides which of the seven cases the rest of the sentence takes. Before any endings, learn the five decisions every Polish verb makes, and the two words you need to read a dictionary entry.
Five decisions in every verb
English write is one shape. Polish pisać is the same word before it is used; the moment it is used, the speaker has decided five things, and each one shows in the word.
| Decision | Polish | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Aspect | pisać / napisać | Whether the action is a process being described or a result that exists. Two words, not one. |
| Person and number | piszę / piszemy | I write / we write. Six forms in the present, plus a polite pan/pani form. |
| Gender (past only) | pisałem / pisałam | Whether the speaker was male or female. This is why a Polish past tense never hides who spoke. |
| Tense | present, past, future | Three tenses, not the two-dozen English ones. Aspect does the rest of the work. |
| Completion and command | zamknij! — zamknąłbyś | Imperative, conditional, and whether a verb can even have one. |
Polish has three tenses. Where English says I will have been writing, Polish says będę pisać or napisałem and lets aspect carry the meaning. Once you accept that, most of the "complicated" verb system here turns out to be smaller than you feared — and the parts that are genuinely hard are concentrated in aspect (chapter 2) and in the handful of irregular verbs (chapter 8).
The dictionary form
The form you look up and learn first is the infinitive (bezokolicznik). You cannot mistake it: Polish infinitives end in one of a few letters, and the ending tells you which family the verb might belong to and, in three cases, what its present tense will look like.
| Ending | Example | Typical present tense | How common |
|---|---|---|---|
| -ać | czytać | czytam, czytasz | The most common infinitive in the language, and almost always -am in the present. |
| -ić | mówić | mówię, mówisz | Large family; the present nearly always ends in -ię, -isz. |
| -yć | uczyć się | uczę się, uczysz się | Same shape as -ić in the present, but a hard consonant before the ending. |
| -eć | rozumieć | rozumiem, rozumiesz | A closed, old family; only a few dozen verbs. Some are irregular (chapter 8). |
| -nąć | zamknąć | zamknę, zamkniesz | Nearly always perfective, and nearly always a single act. |
| -ować | pracować | pracuję, pracujesz | A borrowing family (Latin, German, English): studiować, telefonować. |
| -uczyć, -czyć | skończyć | skończę, skończysz | Just the -yć family seen from the stem. |
An infinitive ending tells you what to expect, not what the verb does. dać ends in -ać and is perfective; być breaks every pattern in the chapter. The ending narrows the possibilities — it does not decide them. Every table on this site states the real forms instead of applying the ending blindly.
Reading a dictionary entry
A Polish dictionary entry gives you two headwords, and learners habitually copy only one. That is the single most common way to learn a verb wrong. Here is the entry as this site shows it.
| What the entry says | What it means |
|---|---|
| pisać impf | To write, seen as a process, a habit or something unfinished. This is what you use for "I was writing", "I write every day". |
| napisać pf | To write, seen as finished. "I wrote it" (and it exists now), "I will write it" (and it will be there). |
| the pair is given in order impf → pf | Learn both halves as one item: pisać / napisać · to write. A verb learned alone is a verb you will use with the wrong aspect. |
The impf and pf marks on this site mean the same as imperfective and perfective in a dictionary, and the same as ndk. (niedokonany) and dk. (dokonany) in a Polish one, or i. and p. in older English dictionaries of Polish. Whatever the book, you are looking for the same two letters.
Transitive, intransitive, and why it matters
A transitive verb (przechodni) takes a direct object, which in Polish means an object in the accusative — or in the genitive when the sentence is negated or the object is a quantity. An intransitive verb (nieprzechodni) takes none, and usually wants a fixed case or preposition of its own instead.
| Verb | Kind | What follows it |
|---|---|---|
| czytać | transitive | Czytam książkę. — accusative |
| szukać | transitive in meaning, genitive in grammar | Szukam kluczy. — genitive, always |
| iść | intransitive | Idę do sklepu. — do + genitive |
| pomagać | intransitive | Pomagam mamie. — dative |
"Transitive" in Polish grammar is about the object's case, not about whether the English translation sounds transitive. szukać (to look for) takes the genitive; słuchać (to listen to) takes the genitive; pomagać (to help) takes the dative. Chapter 9 is the full list; the point here is that you learn the case with the verb, from day one.
The first three traps
Drills
Flashcards
One card, one decision. Turn it over, then say whether you know it. The cards remember what you marked.
A 7-day plan
Fifteen focused minutes a day beats three hours on Sunday. Tick the boxes as you go — the ticks are saved.