"Mój trener pracuje na siłowni."

Translation: My coach works at the gym.

[zagadka314]

Why isn't "My trainer works at the gym" suggested? To me a coach is usually more for a team while a trainer is for an individually.

[Jellei]

"Trainer" works. Nothing here suggests that this is not your baseball coach ;)

[Valerie261225]

why not in "a fitness club" ?

[Jellei]

Because we can say "klub fitness" in Polish. And that's not exactly a synonym. You can have a gym at school, for example, but it's hardly a fitness club.

[mark.boats]

Not questioning the answer at all, but I'm curious how the locative form of "siłownia" is "siłowni" and not "siłownie" or "siłowny" which my gut would initially go to

I thought the rules for declension of fem. sg. nouns followed three basic rules

koszykówka -> Nie wiem nic o koszykówce

praca -> Jestem w pracy

poezja -> Nie wiem nic o poezji

Is there another rule I've missed or is siłownia just an irregular declension?

[alik1989]

You can treat -nia as a declinable suffix which almost always has the same inflection pattern.

See declension table in the middle of the page:

https://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/-nia

[mark.boats]

That makes sense

[Jellei]

koszykówka -> gram w koszykówkę. For playing sports and games, that's "w" + Accusative, not Locative.

[mark.boats]

Oh god, changed it now...

Jellei please teach me how to swear in Polish, I feel like I need it sometimes

[MeowMaria87]

Could "w" substitute "na"?

[alik1989]

Yes, 'w' is an accepted answer.

There are two possible choices:

1) na + locative to indicate location (ćwiczę na siłowni) and na + accusative to indicate direction (chodzę na siłownię).

2) w + locative to indicate location (ćwiczę w siłowni) and do + genitive to indicate direction (chodzę do siłowni).

I believe that there is no difference in meaning between those two. However, the Polish National Corpus suggests that there was a 23% decrease in usage for option 2) but a 27% increase in usage for option 1) when comparing the pre-2004 period with the post-2004 period.

So I conclude that option 2) gets more probable the older the speaker is. Linguist Prof. Bańko also took a look at the corpus results and seemed surprised that 1) is already several times more common, as he himself would still prefer 2).

https://sjp.pwn.pl/poradnia/haslo/silownia;2074.html

However, according to Wikipedia, he was born in 1959, which could explain his preference.