The vocabulary multiplies, the sound shifts proliferate, and the grammar rules increase and interconnect each week to the point of mute exasperation, but not yet to despair. Not that Polish isn’t orderly, but given its complexity, and the fact that all order has core elements of arbitrariness and historical whim, Polish order is not as strictly logical as common sense might expect. (And my sense is nothing but common.) I have noted before a class of masculine noun with the feminine ending –a, kolega, sluzbista, artysta, mezczyzna. The word declines as a feminine noun, but takes masculine adjectives and their declinations—fair enough—but now we discover only in the singular. Because? Yes, because. Because that is the way it is. If Polish verbs agree in number in the present tense, but in number and gender in the past and future tenses, so be it. I try to be reasonable. Why is this necessary? (I have yet to encounter a sentence or a rhetorical situation in which these fine grammatical distinctions communicate any significance proportional to the intellectual effort it takes to remember them.) After over a year of study, my classmates and I still offer answers to the most seemingly straightforward exercises as educated guesses with the intonation of questions. Strangely, Professor Polakiewicz endures that intonation with greater patience and even sympathy now, as he warns us about verbs of motion and the further nuances of the number system. I soldier forward, chin high, up to my moustache tips in grammar and usage.
The carpenter comes on Tuesday, we wtorek, the plumber on Wednesday, w srode, and the painters later this month, pazdziernik. A step here, a step there.
