miałem okazję

In short

Why it looks that way

Literally "he had the occasion": I had the occasion to work with him. A woman says the feminine. Beside stands the opportunity-word — the same, only bookier.

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.

• Miałem okazję pracować z nim przez rok

  I got the chance to work with him for a year

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

• pamiętam jak dziś — I remember it as if it were todayphrase
• nie spodziewałem się — I did not expectphrase
• omal nie — almost (did something)phrase
• odkąd pamiętam — for as long as I rememberphrase
• All Polish wordsIndex by topic
• Why a word list doesn't sticka note