Colors! This lesson is not only about color vocabulary, but about accusative and genitive declensions of adjectives and plural nouns.

Vocabulary - Słownictwo

Adjectives - Przymiotniki

* Not in the lesson, but interesting. It also is the name of the national coin of Poland. ** Not in the lesson, but someone taught me this one. Many fruits are green when they are unripe, and so these two concepts coincide in Polish. As a note, they also do in Spanish and Japanese (well, except in Japanese they say blue for this concept).

Nouns - Rzeczowniki

We only saw the noun for colors in this lesson, but reading about them I found a few more interesting ones, so why not study them here:

Here’s a little joke appropriate for this lesson: There’s no such thing as bieskie by the way, niebieskie comes from niebo, like we said before, but it’s funny so i put it here.

Now, same as in English, there’s some colors that define varieties of food, such as

Białe wino	White wine
Czerwone wino	Red wine
--
Białe mięso	White meat (chicken, fish, etc.)
Czerwone mięso	Red meat (pork, beef, etc.)

And when we use the colors as nouns, they always stay masculine: Biały i czerwony to kolory - White and red are colors

Genitive Plural - Liczba mnoga dopełniacz

We’ve been seeing a lot of genitive sentences lately. For example when an accusative gets negated, or for some verbs that take the genitive case always. However we haven’t seen many plural examples, and this lesson introduces them pretty suddenly: On nie ma niebieskich butów - He doesn’t have blue shoes. Now, we will see about the adjectives in the following subsection, but for now let’s focus on the noun. “Buty - Butów” You can read more about plural nouns in Genitive here: https://mowicpopolsku.com/polish-grammar/cases/genitive/#noun-plural

Masculine plural nouns

Without getting complicated, there’s only two rules that matter for now:

Hard ending consonant masculine nouns in Genitive have the ending -ów.

Following the usual rules (for example removing -ie before the last consonant, like in pies), we add the ending -ów. We could for example replace the ending for nominative plural and replace it, if it helps to visualize.

Soft ending consonant masculine nouns in Genitive have the ending -i. Nouns ending in -sz and -cz end in -y.

It also works for plural nouns without singular that end in -nie.

Neuter plural nouns

Most neuter nouns have no ending in the genitive form.

They drop the vowel at the end (-o or -e) and if after removing there are equivalent sounds for soft consonants like -ni, it is replaced by its corresponding consonant -ń.

Neuter nouns ending in -ko or -ło receive -e before the end consonant.

If after the removal of -o “kn” remains, it becomes -kien. Also works for plural nouns without singular that end in -ki.

Exception:

Neuter nouns ending in -ę replace ending with -ąt.

Femenine plural nouns and Masculine personal -a nouns

Most feminine nouns have no ending in the genitive form. Nouns ending in -ka receive -e before the end consonant.

Similar to the neuter, the vowel -a is dropped. Soft endings such as -ni also get replaced with their equivalent, such as -ń. Similar to neuter, -ka endings get replaced with -ek.

Genitive Adjectives - Przymiotniki Dopełniające

We saw a complete table of declensions for adjectives before in this notebook, but let's take a refresher for the genitive case specifically. You can see a full table with the suffixes of other cases here: https://mowicpopolsku.com/polish-grammar/word-classes/adjectives/#declension Or here: https://www.clozemaster.com/blog/polish-adjectives/ For now let’s focus on the accusative and genitive, as per this lesson.

Now, remember the accusative for masculine nouns gets split into mimicking Genitive for Male animate nouns and staying in Nominative for Male inanimate nouns, which is why accusative is also in this lesson. Also remember, the difference between -y and -i, or -ych/-ich and so on is from the consonant at the end (-k and -g get -i and the others get -y).

Extra material from songs

Now up to now we've seen plenty of grammar and vocabulary. If you saw the dedication in my home page, you know that I've also been listening to songs to try and apply this new knowledge. I realized I understood quite a bit more after this lesson, so I made a new extra lesson / blog post with extra vocabulary from the songs I listen to. If you're interested, you could go to the lesson using the red button below, or skip to the next Duolingo lesson, "Questions".