A Polish date is four decisions, not four numbers: the day is an ordinal, the month takes its genitive, and the year stays a plain number until its very last word. Here is a date for you to practise on.
Say it in Polish, then reveal the answer.
Every reading above comes out of these. Learn them and a date stops being a wall of numbers.
The day is an ordinal and the month changes ending: listopad becomes listopada. Both are genitive, because a date answers kiedy? — when?
Only the tail of the year is an ordinal. Dwa tysiące stays a plain number and dwudziestego czwartego carries the ending — and both halves of the compound inflect.
A round thousand has nowhere to put the ending but on itself, so the whole year becomes one ordinal: dwutysięcznego.
Same again one step down. Nothing follows the hundreds, so dziewięćset becomes dziewięćsetnego — but only in a year that stops there.
Watch Your Language is an iPhone and Apple Watch app for vocabulary. It puts the words you are learning in a widget on your Lock Screen and on your watch face, a few at a time, and brings back the ones you keep forgetting — including the months and numbers this drill runs on:
Watch Your LanguageVocabulary widgets for iPhone & Apple Watch