To take ashower - Brać prysznic

Brać    -    the verb to take in it's imperfective form.  Like English, you can take a shower, take a tablet, take no prisoners, take payment, take something (with your hands), take by force and more besides.

Biorę prysznic    -    I'm taking a shower

Czy bierzesz prysznic?    -    Are you taking a shower?

bierze     -    s/he is taking

plurals: bierzemy / bierzecie / biorą   


Brałem prysznic    -    I was taking a shower (said by a male)

Brałam prysznic    -    I was taking a shower (said by a woman)

brałeś / brałaś - 2nd person sing. masc. / fem. past tense

brał / brała - 3rd


I'm going to leave the plurals for now.  Partly for simplicity and partly because I'm an uptight Englishman and communal showering is just too horrific to contemplate and only the young focus on the sexy side of showering with your partner, ignoring the risk to life and limb or, at any rate, the environmental impact of such a long shower.

As mentioned in the post on taking tablets, brać is the imperfective form, the perfective form is wziąć.  Take note, that in the conjugation of the past tense, there are vowel changes between the masculine and feminine forms before the ł as well as after.

wziąłem / wzięłam prysznic    -    I took a shower

wziąłeś / wzięłaś    -    2nd pers.

wziął / wzięłą    -    3rd pers.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To get a cob on - co to znaczy?

Image
To get a cob on ... what does it mean and where did the expression come from? Po prostu, -  get a cob on -  to znaczy wpadać w złość / być w złym humorze. Most English people will be familiar with this expression, to get a cob on is to be annoyed, to be in a bad mood. The word cob is an old word to describe something rounded or globular, a lump of something.  This explains the use of cob in the expression I'm sweating cobs which means the beads of sweat are large. Cobble stones on old roads owe their name to this meaning too. Cob also describes the cylindrical shoot on which grains of maize / corn grow, hence: corn on the cob. How about the origin of the expression to get a cob on ?  Well, I guess there will be plenty of theories, but the official line from the Oxford English Dictionary is that the origin is unknown.  It has been seen in print as early as 1937, in E. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang .
Read more

Poznańskie Muzeum Pyry - The Poznań Spud Museum

Image
After booking a visit to The Poznań Potato Museum I found the tour was not available in English*, so I would need to translate as best I can for my family.  Which, considering I struggle to understand spoken Polish at normal speed, will probably result in me making it up as I go along.  But: best foot forward; I shall do my best. (*The reply from the museum said the tour was mainly in Polish, which is fair enough considering the Museum is situated in Poland) A bit of advance preparation is needed, so I will note some spud related vocabulary here.  I first learned that Ziemniak is the word for potato, but just as we have spuds, tatties, and taters, the Polish have other words for potato.  There is the Germanic word kartofel , but in the Poznań area the dialect word pyra is used, pyry being the plural, but also the genitive singular. What other vocabulary may crop up? uprawa / uprawy     -     crop / crops uprawiać     -     to grow / cultivate uprawa polowa     -     field crop bulwa
Read more

Nail Polish

Image
I'm starting this blog as a place to keep notes along my journey with the Polish language.  It's really just for me in a bid to help me nail Polish.  If it eventually helps or interests others, then that would be splendid.  I would welcome helpful comments and thoughts if I have misunderstood anything. This is not a learning course for beginners.  I am learning Polish and making notes along the way as I learn things, so it is quite literally as I understand it. If you want to learn Polish, find a patient and helpful Polish friend, use an app like Duolingo , follow bloggers and teachers like the ones listed below, buy a book like Polish for Dummies, watch Polish films and TV, listen to Polish music, and make lots of notes to enable you to get your head around the grammar of this heavily inflected language.  Best of luck! Update: Links to more places and people who have taught me a great deal: Polish teacher, Aleksandra,  Being Ponglish website and on Instagram Elena Leman, a ve
Read more