Cases are the nemesis of all Polish learners. We know: there are just so many of them (seven, to be exact!) and they’re all so similar. If you’ve never heard of them, the idea is quite simple: nouns change their ending depending on their function in a sentence. So, you might say ‘łóżko jest brązowe’ (the bed is comfortable), but ‘leżę na łóżku (I’m lying on the bed). Although the declination of nouns varies depending on factors such as their gender, their number, the structure of the word and other similar factors, there are so many exceptions that, in the end, it could depend on moon cycles and nobody would notice the difference.
As a result, there is only one good solution to mastering cases – study hard! That’s what all Polish schoolchildren have to do, and believe me, it was torture. There is some hope, though! Poles themselves hate some cases so much that a few of them may even die out in the future. Genitive and accusative are often so similar that people sometimes overuse the former, as it’s more common. So don’t be surprised if somebody says the genitive ‘podaj pilota’ (pass the remote) instead of the weirdly-sounding but grammatically-correct ‘podaj pilot’.
The vocative case also tends to disappear. If Poles want to refer to or call somebody, they most often just use the nominative: ‘Cześć, Michał!’ (Hello, Michał!), and not: ‘Cześć Michale!’ – as the latter sounds a bit old-fashioned. Most seem to have agreed that the vocative should stay where it belongs... and that is in the famous first line of the Polish national epic poem Pan Tadeusz: 'Litwo, ojczyzno moja!' (Lithuania, my fatherland!)
Other than that, however, we’re sorry, but cases are here to stay and make life in Poland difficult. Did you find a cool place in one of Culture.pl’s Polish articles you’d like to visit? Good luck deciding what the nominative of its name should be! Phrases like ‘wakacje nad Jeziorem Okonińskim’ (holidays at Jezioro Okonińskie), ‘kawiarnia na Saskiej Kępie’ (a café in Saska Kępa) and ‘wieś niedaleko Gorzowa Wielkopolskiego’ (a village near Gorzów Wielkopolski) might make it a little tricky to find these places on the map.
And let’s not forget that in order to get there, you’ll need to purchase some tickets (bilety). ‘Jeden bilet’ (one ticket), ‘dwa bilety’ (two tickets), ‘trzy bilety’ and ‘cztery bilety’ make a lot of sense. You just use the nominative. But travelling in larger groups gets more complicated, even if you plan well in advance. If you need five tickets, you should ask for ‘pięć biletów’ not ‘pięć bilety’, and you need to continue using the genitive ‘biletów’ as you add more tickets. That is, unless you reach 22, 23 and 24 (or 32, 43, 164, etc.). Any number of tickets larger than 20 that ends with 2, 3 or 4 will once again use the nominative form ‘bilety’.
Got it? That’s great, because as soon as you order the preferred number of tickets, you’ll have to go through the same ordeal with money (and anything else, really). The price of admission might be ‘dwa złote’ for children and ‘pięć złotych’ for adults, and bargaining that down to ‘dwa złotych’ or ‘pięć złote’ is not really possible.
Gender