I did a lesson on word formation with a group of juniors today. We worked on turning nouns to adjectives (i.e., beauty to beautify) verbs to nouns (i.e., improve to improvement), and then I stunned them with the news that they were going to learn more than a thousand new words during the lesson.

It’s an easy lingustic trick, really. Words that end in “-ation” in English usually are virtually identical in Polish, only with an “-acja” (pronounced “aat-see-ya”) suffix, or a variation.

• “revolution” is “rewolucja”
• “inflation” is “inflacja”
• “distribution” is “dystrybucja”

I don’t think I need to elaborate on what word young Rafał blurted out in class…