Linguistic revelations

My Polish classes are from 8 until 9:30 on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I am proudly present at every one of them, regardless of my activities the previous night. On this particular occasion I had been disporting myself with Marcin at Bar Polyester in advance of his departure for Koszalin for a week,  had decided (for my own mysterious reasons) not to drink a coffee, and was not at my best.

On this particular day, our teacher decided that we were going to do imperatives.  Being a Polish wife and speaking mainly in Polish at home, I am very familiar with this form but was  shocked to find that there was something fundamental that I didn’t know about it.  This something might not be very exciting for anyone who couldn’t care less about Polish, but for me it was a revelation. And it’s this- when you tell somebody not to do something, you use the imperfective aspect; when you tell somebody to do something, the perfective. Which is why you say “zamknij drzwi”, but “nie zamykaj drzwi.” I had half registered to myself a difficulty in choosing a form while being imperious, but had no idea there was a rule. I haven’t had such a shock since discovering that aspect actually existed in Polish (not that long ago, truth be told). In all my not- insignificant trawling through Polish grammar, nobody had ever informed me that this is how you make imperatives.

This piece of information threw me so far off my game that I became somehow incapable of forming an imperative for the rest of the lesson. The experience of being the most retarded student in the room came in handy on Friday evening  when I had to somehow remain patient and calm with a conversation student who was pronouncing group as ‘grub’ for the 200 th time.  Some things, I told myself, are just hard to grasp.