Prepositions - Introduction

Prepositions (przyimki) are words that express relationships between words or alter their meaning. Compare the two sentences below. They are identical except for the preposition. These prepositions alter the meaning of these sentences:

In Polish, prepositions are indeclinable, meaning they have just one form. However, a few prepositions have an additional variation with an added ending. These additional variations are used to avoid clusters of consonants that would be difficult to pronounce. Compare the two sentences below. They both use the same preposition, but two different variations of it:

The table below shows all the prepositions that have an additional variation with an added sound:

Polish and English prepositions differ greatly. You cannot simply learn the Polish translation of about and then use it in all contexts where about is used in English. One English preposition can be translated into multiple Polish prepositions depending on the context:

Similarly, one Polish preposition can be translated into multiple English prepositions:

There are also situations in which an English sentence uses a preposition, but the same sentence in Polish does not (and vice versa):

There is one more thing that sets Polish prepositions apart from their English counterparts. In a given context, each Polish preposition requires a specific case. When you learn a new usage of a preposition, you must also learn which grammatical case to use in that context.

Let's look at the example from the beginning of this article again:

There are two different forms of the noun  stół(table). The first sentence uses the Locative Case and the second uses the Instrumental Case. Here is a declination table for this noun; you can find these forms in the table:

You may have noticed, that the Vocative form is the same as the Locative form. So how can you tell if the noun is in the Locative case? Well, this is where the "problem" of shared case endings begins. Sometimes it is impossible to determine the case of a noun from the sentence alone.  stół is a masculine noun, and masculine nouns have the same Locative and Vocative forms in the singular. If we replace this word with a feminine noun, it becomes clear that it is the locative case. Let's use the word  ławka(bench):

Now, it is clear that the noun is in the locative case in the first sentence.

What happens when you use the wrong case? Most of the time, a native speaker will be able to understand you, but sometimes changing the case can alter the meaning of a sentence. Sometimes, this change can be drastic. See the example below:

The lack of a simple one-to-one translation between English and Polish prepositions makes learning them quite difficult.

The best approach is to stop trying to translate them from English to Polish, and instead learn how to use each Polish preposition in the various contexts in which it can be used.

Some contexts use more than one preposition. In such cases, it is more effective to learn them as a group rather than individually. One example of this would be when answering the question Where are you?. Depending on the answer, a different preposition is required. Look at the examples below (ironically, both the English and Polish sentences use multiple prepositions to answer this question).