How do you say “what’s your name” in Polish?
Zagadka: jak ma na imię mama?
A1 Polish listening practice · Standard Polish · Picked for people who know a little
Polish asks for your first name with a curious formula: Jak masz na imię? — literally “How do you have for a name?” The answer keeps the shape: Mam na imię Julia, “I have Julia for a name.” This clip is a riddle that hammers the third-person version — Jak ma na imię mama? (“What’s the mom’s name?”) — over and over, which makes the pattern impossible to forget.
Mieć na imię covers only the first name (imię). For the full name, Polish switches verbs: Jak się nazywasz? / Nazywam się Jan Kowalski. Both questions will be among the first ten sentences you ever exchange in Polish, so the riddle — mom has three children named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... — is sneaky-good drilling: by the punchline you’ve heard the question six times.
How common are the words?
How common are the words in this A1 Polish listening practice video?
How common in written Polish
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Harder words in this video
These words are harder than A1. Here is what they mean.
Source: wordfreq 3.1.1 (general) · SUBTLEX-PL 2014 (spoken). These numbers are close, not perfect.