It takes a long time to learn Polish, but if you’re confident enough, you can fake it. The verb to bluff in Polish is blefować, that’s right, it basically the English verb to bluff + ować. That’s what I’m proposing.

Here are three ways you can ‘fake it til you make it’:

1. -ować

A lot of Polish verbs end in -ować, especially those borrowed from other languages:

• adapt = adaptować
• decide = decydować
• flirt = flirtować

I remember laughing out loud when I heard the Polish verb for saving a copy of data in a separate location is ‘backupować’. Perhaps Polish should borrow the grammatical structure as well and use ‘backować up‘:

• Backowałem ten plik up

or

• Backowałem ten plik do góry

Okay, maybe not.

Anyway if you don’t know a Polish verb, then just add -ować to the end of an English one. You’ll have a fair chance of being correct.

And if you want to turn the verb into a noun, add -owanie:

• blefowanie
• flirtowanie

You’ll need to decide yourself whether to say ‘backowanie up’ or ‘backupowanie’.

2. -ka

When talking about professions, use the English word for the male role. But remember to add – ka to the end of word if you’re talking about a woman:

• barmanka
• biznesmanka
• wokalistka

Note that it doesn’t matter if the word contains the word ‘man’. Just stick a -ka on the end and it’s transformed into the female gender!

3. -czny / istyczny / -owy

For adjectives, it’s a little harder because there are two possible endings depending on the sound of the word:

• drastic = drastyczny
• mystic = mistyczny
• snobby = snobistyczny

There’s one important exception to this rule: If you’re talking about something trendy, then you need to use ‘-owy‘ instead:

• cult = kultowy
• cool = coolowy
• oldschool = oldschoolowy

If something was trendy but isn’t anymore, then perhaps the ending will change from -owy to -czny / -istyczny, i.e. in the future when cool is no longer cool, then Poles will say ‘coolistyczny‘.