mam

In short

Why it looks that way

Literally "I hold". The negation is nie mam, and the thing you lack moves into its of-form: Nie mam czasu — "I have no time".

A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.

In a live sentence

A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.

• Mam dwoje dzieci

  I have two children

Nearby words: verbs

I want, I can, I am going, I know. The verb holds a sentence together: a few of the most frequent ones cover more everyday talk than a long list of nouns.

• chcę

  I want

  the opening chc is no typo — it is pronounced: "khtsen"
• lubię

  I like

  For fondness and tastes: Lubię kawę. Strong feeling is kochać — Kocham cię is not said about coffee.
• iść

  to go (on foot)

  said "eeshtch"
• jeść

  to eat

  said "yeshch"
• pić

  to drink

  The present shifts its stem: piję, pijesz, pije. The drink itself is napój — a different root.
• czytać

  to read

  The spelling misleads: czy starts with a "ch" sound, not the vowel it suggests. Czytam książki — "I read books" — is the best evening habit a language can ask of you.
• mówić

  to speak

  Said "MOO-veech": the w is a v. A language is spoken adverbially, not by name: Mówię po polsku, never "mówię polski".
• pracować

  to work

  From praca. The same word answers "what do you do?": Pracuję w banku covers both the position and the business.
• mieszkać

  to live (reside)

  To live somewhere: Mieszkam w Krakowie — "I live in Kraków". The flat shares the root: mieszkanie is literally "the residing place".
• mieć

  to have

  said "myench"

Test yourself

Five questions from the same set — “verbs”. Recalling a spelling from meaning is harder than knowing a familiar word on sight, and therefore more useful.

How not to forget this word

Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.

• This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many times
  Kim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
• Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many times
  Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
• An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many times
  Bertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.

Next

• Verbs110 words on the topic
• polski — Polish (language)noun
• uczyć się — to learn, to studyverb
• i — andconjunction
• ale — butconjunction
• All Polish wordsIndex by topic
• Why a word list doesn't sticka note