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At the edge of the hill marking the traditional Polish part of town in Pittsburgh, PA stands a decorative sign proudly proclaiming Witamy do Polish Hill, somebody’s idea of how to say, ‘Welcome to Polish Hill.’ Any Pole will tell you that the correct way to say this is Witamy w Polish Hill, but the sign has stood uncorrected in its place for some 45 years, an unwitting tribute to the communicative movement in foreign language instruction. Who cares if the sign is in bad Polish if the meaning gets across?
Although I have never observed the specific acceptance of the aforementioned error by a language instructor, as a long-time visitor to Polish language classes in the Summer Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, I grew accustomed to observing the enthusiastic acceptance by instructors of equally egregious ways of saying things in Polish as long as they were clear in meaning. To be sure the same instructors would probably not accept such mistakes on a written assignment, but they too frequently allow them to pass in speaking because they are “communicatively effective.” And so, the mistake remains firmly entrenched in the student’s consciousness forever after.
I actually do not have a simple solution for the problem posed by Witamy do Polish Hill. I take comfort in the fact that preposition choice after verbs is every bit as much of a problem for Poles going into English as it is for English speakers learning Polish. As a non-native speaker of Polish myself, I constantly have to stop myself from saying narzekać o instead of narzekać na, or głosować za instead of głosować na. Trying to philosophize about the underlying semantics of the verbs concerned invariably leads down a stray path, at least for language learners. It is best to anticipate a learner’s likelihood of making a mistake and to ward it off in advance, but practically speaking that is not possible to do for every verb a student might be expected to use incorrectly with a preposition. However, I have found one rule of thumb to be broadly useful for handling grammatical cases following most verb-plus-preposition phrasal collocations commonly used in beginning language classes. Among other things, this rule “solves” the mystery of why, say, the verb pytać o ‘ask about’ is followed by the accusative case (ACC) rather than by the locative (LOC), something most Polish speakers are also at a loss to explain.
Such errors as Witamy do Polish Hill are perfectly honest mistakes, and do not necessarily indicate a lack of diligence on the part of the student. Instead, they reflect the reasonable expectation that, unless told otherwise, things will be the same in Polish as they are in English. It is not always feasible to head such English-inspired grammatical or lexical errors off at the pass, so to speak. However, there are nevertheless a few identifiable areas, not well addressed in textbooks, where this is possible. I will point to three of them, encapsulated in three “rules of thumb,” in the present blog post.
Rule of thumb #1
Almost all common verb-plus-preposition phrasal combinations other than ‘to think about’, ‘to remember about’, ‘to forget about’ take prepositions followed by the accusative case rather than by some other case with which the preposition might otherwise occur. The three verbs myśleć, pamiętać, zapominać, as exceptions, are followed by o plus the locative case. Among common verb-preposition collocations whose syntax is “resolved” by this rule are, for example, czekać na ‘to wait for’, dbać o, ‘to take care about’, dziękować za ‘to thank for’, martwić się o ‘ to worry about’, patrzeć na‘to look at’, płacić za ‘to pay for’, prosić o ‘to ask for, to request’, pytać o‘ to ask about’, wątpić w‘ to doubt’, wierzyć w ‘to believe in’.
No doubt many verb-preposition phrasal combinations can be found that violate this rule (for this reason it is called a “rule of thumb”). I can immediately think of polegać na +LOC ‘to rely on,’ alongside the rule-following nalegać na +ACC ‘to insist on.’ However, I predict that they will be ones less often needed in the early stages of language-learning.
Rule of thumb #2
Get rid of the verb nosić ‘to wear.’ Given that people “wear” things to class and to other places, both clothing-words and a verb for ‘to wear’ are useful at early stages of classroom discussions—all the more so in that clothing is also useful for practicing colors. Dictionaries and, after them, many or most textbooks, give the word for ‘to wear’ as nosić -szę -sisz. However, this verb is indeterminate in aspect, a concept that is normally not introduced until well after the need to say ‘wear.’ Nosić means ‘wear frequently or regularly,’ as in Do pracy zwykle noszę ciemne garnitury ‘I usually wear dark suits to work.’ Confoundingly, this verb’s corresponding determinate partner nieść (ja niosę, ty niesiesz) is not used in the logically expected sense ‘to be wearing.’ Instead of *Spójrz, jaką fajną sukienkę ona niesie! (‘Look what a cool dress she is wearing!’) one must replace niesie with something else, for example: Spójrz, jaką fajną sukienkę ona ma na sobie!
The phrase mieć na sobie is what Poles usually say for ‘wear’ in the commonly needed present progressive aspectual mode. Even in frequentative contexts, where it would theoretically be appropriate, Poles are apt not to use nosić but to say something like Do pracy on chodzi zwykle w ciemnym garniturze (‘He usually wears a dark suit to work’). In the simple past or future tense, mieć na sobie is often replaced with być w +LOC, as in Na przyjęciu on był w ciemnym garniturze (‘He wore a dark suit to the reception).’ To summarize, the verb nosić can safely be eliminated from the student’s vocabulary as the verb for ‘to wear,’ thereby sparing the student from a lifetime of using nosić mostly incorrectly.
By the way, in case one were to introduce the phrase być ubrany w +ACC ‘to be dressed in,’ which is yet another common way to express ‘to wear’ without using nosić, one may refer for its syntax to rule-of-thumb #1 above; that is, the phrase takes the accusative, not, as students might logically think, the locative case.
Rule of thumb #3
Be wary of using mieć ‘to have’ when speaking about add-ons, additions, and additives. I have never personally seen the following matter discussed in any handbook on the Polish language, although maybe it has been, and I just missed it. Like the Witamy do Polish Hill issue, it has to do with assuming that what works in English surely also works in the same way in Polish. However, unlike the other matters discussed here, instead of grammar, one would appear here to be visiting the space between grammar and style.
When an element is a definitively inherent part of something inanimate, Polish will have no problem in using mieć (ja mam, ty masz)‘to have’ to describe the situation, as in Samochód ma cztery koła (‘A car has four wheels’). Otherwise, Polish will try to avoid mieć by using some other word, usually być w +LOC, but also often a more specific or descriptively precise word. See the English–Polish comparisons:
| Does the garage have electricity? | Czy w garażu jest prąd? |
| Does this dish have garlic in it? | Czy w tym daniu jest czosnek? |
| Does Łódź have a water park? | Czy w Łodzi jest park wodny? |
| Does the motel have a swimming pool? | Czy motel posiada basen? |
| Does this coffee have arsenic in it? | Czy ta kawa zawiera arsen? |
| Does Warsaw have a zoo? | Czy w Warszawie znajduje się zoo? |
| Does the room have air conditioning? | Czy pokój jest klimatyzowany? |
This rule of thumb can be verified by feeding the above English sentences into Google Translate, which, in these and most other such instances, at least, has been correctly trained.* The corresponding Polish sentences, if they used mieć (as, for example, Czy garaż ma prąd?),would be perfectly comprehensible, and strictly speaking, they would not even be ungrammatical, but they would nevertheless strike many or most Poles as stylistically “off.” Does this mean that the next time someone asks something like Czy garaż ma prąd? they should be corrected? I would say definitely yes. Along with deriving satisfaction from having successfully communicated a thought in Polish, the student will additionally be exposed to useful information about actual language use.
It seems to me that this last subject, i.e., limitations on the use of the verb mieć, or differences between English have and Polish mieć, is deserving of a full monographic treatment. It certainly merits much more attention than one is able to give it in the present blog post. I already notice that samochód seems to pose an exception to rule #3. For the English sentence Does the car have a cigarette lighter? my rule predicts something like Czy samochód jest wyposażony w zapalniczkę? (‘Is the car equipped with a cigarette lighter?’), whereas Google prefers ma (‘has’), not only for ‘lighter’ but also for ‘disc brakes,’ ‘automatic transmission,’ and all kinds of other add-on car features. Clearly, this rule of thumb needs work. I welcome anyone’s thoughts on this or any other of the topics raised here.
—Oscar Swan, University of Pittsburgh, swan@pitt.edu
*One could gain a better insight on this topic by inviting students to feed into Google Translate various sample proposals for using mieć in simple sentences like the ones given above, and to report back on the findings. Obviously, Google Translate is not always to be taken at face value. For one thing, it is trained in British English, and translates ‘apartment’ as apartament, while mieszkanie is ‘flat.’ Google’s results always have to be checked against reality and with native speakers. The native speaker of Polish is the most indispensable tool one can have at one’s disposal, and I thank Jolanta Lion for looking over this submission and sharing with me her perspicacious observations.
About the author: Oscar Swan taught Polish language, literature, and culture at the University of Pittsburgh for fifty years. He retired in 2024. He is the author of textbooks in Polish, Slovak, Russian, and Old Church Slavic, and is the recent author of Kaleidoscope of Poland: A Cultural Encyclopedia (2015); Leokadia Schmidt: Rescued from the Ashes (2018); Jędrzej Kitowicz: Customs and Culture under the Last Saxon King (2019); The Short Story in a Polish Context: Polish Short Fiction from the 18th to the 20th Century (2024); and the forthcoming W rok po polsku, a beginning textbook for the first one and a half years of Polish.