Das deutsche und polnische verbale System im Vergleich – die Perspektive des Fremdsprachenunterrichts

The review article discusses the book of Andrzej Kątny „Das Polnische im Spiegel des Deutschen. Studien zur kontrastiven Linguistik“. In the introductory part, the necessity to conduct comparative studies and the possible reasons for difficulties to lean a language which emerge from the interlingual differences – here between German and Polish – are pointed out. In the next part, the chapters of the book are dealt with in some details, whereas special attention has been paid to the first chapter, which addresses the problem and prominent role of contrastive linguistics for the foreign language teaching. Special attention has been also paid to the two following chapters, in which the author discusses the extremely relevant question of aspectuality. In the next part of the review article the following grammatical phenomena of the German and Polish verbal system are focussed on: tenses, passive voice, mood, modal verbs and the concept of assessment/judgement and the grammatical means of its verbalisation. Taking into consideration the objective of the book as didactic aid its main claims are discussed from the perspective of foreign language teaching.