Basic Verbs of Motion II (Examples)

My recent foray into the blog world has caused me to be filled with admiration for you bloggers out there that are able to maintain their blogs with regularity. The thing that makes me glad is that, given my level of Polish, I am not going to run out of material worth writing about any time soon. The flip side is that, given my level, coming up with examples and explanations of this stuff is 1) exhausting and difficult, and 2) takes forever. I left off last post with a hint that I would post some examples using the basic verbs of motion I introduced last time. Here they are:

Iść: (to go on foot)

• Już idę do domu. (Now I am going home.) - on foot
• W piątek, idziemy na imprezę w centrum. (On Friday we are going to a party downtown.) In this case we are not strictly going on foot - we will probably take a tram, but we choose 'iść' because if we use jechać people will think we are traveling much further.

Chodzić: (to go on foot - regularly or frequently)

• Zawsze chodzę na lekcje wcześnie. (I always go to my classes early.)
• Rzadko chodzą do Włoskiej restauracji. (They rarely go to the Italian restaurant)

Jechać: (good for wheeled transport)

• Jadę do Gdańska na spotkanie w weekend. (I am going to Gdańsk on the weekend.)
• Jedziesz ze Stanisławem do Zakopanego na Święta? (Are you going with Stanisław to Zakopane for Chritsmas?)

Jeżdzi: (wheeled transport - regularly or frequently)

• Często jeżdzę do Sopotu z Piotrem, ale wolę jeżdzić z psem. (I often travel to Sopot with Piotr, but I would rather travel with a dog.)
• Weronika jeździ do Otwocka na zupę i kanapki dwa razy w miesiącu. (Weronika goes to Otwock for soup and sandwiches twice a month.)

Examples with pójść and pojechać coming. . . This is a slow process for me! My recent revelation was that by right clicking in the 'compose post' window, I can select a language from the list for the spell checker to use. Spell check in Polish and English! Great! Apparently this works in my Firefox wherever I am on the internet, but I hadn't noticed until now. The number of words in a Polish spell check dictionary must be immense (more than English, surely?) with all the possible endings/przypadki.

Basic Verbs of Motion

There's no part getting too far into other matters if I don't understand the basics. I absolutely need to master the basic verbs of motion in their imperfective and perfective forms. It is not as simple as learning the single verb 'to go.'

The basic Polish verbs of motion:

• to go on foot (non-vehicular)
• iść (infrequently)
• chodzić (repeated, frequently, or habitually)

• to go go by car, train, etc. (vehicular)
• jechać (infrequently)
• jeździć (repeated or habitually)

In the perfective form, the distinction between frequent and infrequent actions is lost. The perfective forms are as follows:

• iść (imp.) and chodzić (imp.) --> pójść (perf.)
• jechać (imp.) and jeździć (imp.) --> pojechać (perf.)

In a post coming soon, I'll try a few examples which will hopefully also shine some light on the perfective/imperfective distinction.