Polish Grammar - Nouns and Genders
What are nouns? What do we mean by a gender? And how can we tell which nouns are which genders? It's all unscrambled here!
Nouns are simply labels we give to things:
- car, house, cat, supermarket, water
It's important to remember that things can have more than one label (noun). For example a car can be described with nouns like:
- automobile, motor
In Polish, like with many other European languages, every noun has a gender
- feminine
- neuter
- masculine
We need to know the gender because it affects other words in the sentence as we'll see in the next lesson.
So how do we know which gender each noun is in Polish? The rules are simple
- If the noun ends in 'a' it's feminine. Remember this by learning that 'woman in Polish is 'kobieta' or think about the name of any Polish female you know ... it will end in 'a'
- If the noun ends in 'e' or 'o' it's neuter and we can remember this with the following mental hooks:
- Jedzenie ends in 'e' and means food. We don't know what food so it's neuter
- Jajko ends in 'o' and means egg. We don't know the gender of the chick inside so it's neuter
- Everything else is masculine
There are exceptions to these rules but follow the above and you will be right 99% of the time.
Genders and Nouns
So we can identify the gender of most nouns with the following rules
- Nouns ending in 'a' are feminine
- Nouns ending in 'o' or 'e' are neuter.
- Everything else is masculine
Sort the nouns below into femine and neuter even if you do not know what some of them mean.
Drag and drop all the dark blue boxes to their correct locations
Make sure your sound is turned on to hear the audio during this exercise
Refresher
Revise earlier words and phrases to keep them fresh! Match the Polish and Engish below
Make sure your sound is turned on to hear the audio during this exercise
Nouns
Tick all of the nouns below which are masculine
Tick all of the boxes you believe are correct