So, I got carried away with my previous polish your Polish post, but I had to tell you how to express love in Polish, ok? Sorry if my voice sounded very uninspiring, but somehow the idea of expressing my feelings to an inanimate object (i.e. my microphone) didn’t quite work for me.
Hence today I’m going back to basics and, having given you a sample of Polish greetings, it’s time to continue with this topic, by introducing a few more useful phrases for greeting people.
So let’s start with a morning encounter – after a cup of strong coffee, that is – your ‘Good morning’ becomes
Dzień dobry!
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‘Dzień’ is ‘day’ and ‘dobry’ is an adjective meaning ‘good’. So ‘Good day’ in other words. You’d use this phrase probably up until late afternoon/early evening. We don’t differentiate between the morning and the afternoon, so there’s no direct equivalent of ‘Good afternoon’.
Once the sun has set, you greet people by saying
Dobry wieczór
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‘Good evening’. Again, ‘dobry’ is ‘good’, while ‘wieczór’ means ‘evening’. Please note a different word order, compared to ‘dzień dobry’. This new order will be used for ‘Good night’:
Dobranoc
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However things get slightly more complex here – firstly, the phrase becomes just one word, secondly, the now familiar word ‘dobry’ swaps its last letter for ‘a’. Why? The word for ‘night’ (‘noc’) is a feminine noun in Polish. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that most, but not all nouns in Polish ending in -a are feminine. Thus their modyfying adjectives will also end in -a. (Don’t bang your head. We’ll get there).
Obviously, for greeting your friends and in more informal situations, you can use a whole variety of phrases. Apart from ‘Cześć’ from my first post, you can say:
Jak leci?
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‘How is it going?
Jak się masz?
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“How are you doing?’
So, how is it going? Next time we’ll go through Polish goodbyes. Dobranoc!
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