- Forum >
- Topic: Polish >
- "On mówi po angielsku."
33 Comments
This is actually a good way to put it :)
polski - Polish angielski - English
"Po polsku" indeed means "the way they do it in Poland". Same goes for "po angielsku" - "the way they do it in England".
It usually appears in the name of dishes, e.g. "kawa po francusku" - "coffee the way they do it in France"
(note that adverbs derived from the names of nations are written with lower-case in Polish)
Actually 'angielsku' or 'polsku' are not any forms of adjectives 'angielski' and 'polski' that you will find in the declension table. This is something different, only found in the 'po polsku' construction. You can treat it as "speaking English-style", "speaking Polish-style"... apart from languages, it is used also in some dishes' names, e.g. "ryba po grecku" (Greek-style fish).
Basically dude, "Po" is a preposition. The way I understand it at the moment (if I'm wrong then I apologise, I only learnt about these this morning :P) a preposition is the concrete between a descriptive word and a noun. So, "He speaks English" - "He" is the descriptive word, "speaks" is the preposition, and "English" is obviously the noun.
I put "Po" into Google Translate as I always do so I can listen to two different audio clips of how the word is pronounced and it said that "Po" is a preposition so I then Googled preposition. Here are the sites: https://translate.google.com/#pl/en/po
http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/what-is-a-preposition.html
P.S. I didn't find this out from anyone, this is all just my workings-out so I'd really appreciate it if Jellei co. could make sure I'm not talking rubbish - cheers!
From my comment above:
Actually 'angielsku' or 'polsku' are not any forms of adjectives 'angielski' and 'polski' that you will find in the declension table. This is something different, only found in the 'po polsku' construction. You can treat it as "speaking English-style", "speaking Polish-style"... apart from languages, it is used also in some dishes' names, e.g. "ryba po grecku" (Greek-style fish).
Also, no, nothing can be put into Instrumental here.
Just a small side note:
It's a very bad dictionary that doesn't have the old dative inflection listed for adjectives derived from country names – even(usually not that good, but good enough) English Wiktionary has it. ;)
These „po” constructions are simply very old so they kept connecting with the old dative instead of the new one, when Polish switched to the "new" adjective declension, but it only works with already established collocations – if for example you needed to create one for lions(say for a children story or some SF/Horror), you would rather say „po lwiemu” than „po lwu”, no? ;)
So if I understand well, "mówi" means "to speak", "to say" and "to talk" depending on the context ? (also, I don't understand the red warning as I'm writting this, this is not a mistakes' report, just a question and it hasn't been asked before (or at least I didn't understood it when I read the thread.)
the red warning is always there.
the "speaking" verbs - we have two (pairs). mówić(powiedzieć) is when words leave your mouth, rozmawiać(porozmawiać) is when when people have a conversation- so talk and speak can be translated as both depending on context.
In present tense you can only use mówić and rozmawiać.
OK, now I am confused. I thought from a previous discussion that Polish makes the perfective/imperfective distinction. But the same verb is being translated as
"He speaks English" i.e. he knows the language, this is continually true
"He is speaking in English" i.e. the words currently coming out are in English -a single event
528
perfectives have no present so if the speaking is happening now it is imperfective, ongoing even if only in this instant of the present, so both these usages are imperfective and so the same verb
300
how do you tell the difference between when the man says, "on mowi" and "ona mowi"? this probably is stupid but when i tried the first time i mistook it for ona