"Mężczyzna"
Translation:A man
67 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
While I am doing the course, the only thing I hear in my head is "Poland can into Duolingo".
I know, right! I am so used to Polandball that it is even unusual for me to see the actual non-inverted Polish flag on this site :P
http://www.reddit.com/r/PolandBall
If you know your history, politics, international relations, cultures, languages, basicallyeverythingever, then that is one of the best collections of comics ever.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/polandball
And there's a basic history of it.
It's a nasal vowel! You can hear a recording of just this letter at http://mowicpopolsku.com/polish-alphabet-pronunciation/ :)
For some reason Windows explorer keeps closing that particular webpage. I tried going to the main site and I can, but then if I go to the Alphabet page from there, I still get the same problem. I did find this: http://forvo.com/search/%22M%c4%99%c5%bcczyzna/
and this: http://www.polish-dictionary.com/polish-alphabet-sounds
my friends told me that "ę" = eu , ą = oun but you must read this like you were spanish
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It is pronounced like "eu" but with a shorter, cut-off "u," but I hear it pronounced as "en" frequently in the middle of words, and as a regular "e" at the end of words. I guess rules are made to be broken
there's a rule in polish music, that you have to pronounce "ę" at the end of words like "e", idhk why but that's just some fun fact you may want to know
You know that sound which appears at the end of each word ending with "ing"? Try to say this sound but begginning with e and this would be quite simmilar to ę (but still not the same)
The closest thing I can compare it to is " eh" , it's not entirely correct though
Don't worry. Many Poles don't know how to spell this word too. Męższczyzna is a common misspelling.
męż + czy + zna: the first one comes from old Polish mąż, now only meaning husband; the second is the same particle czy that starts a question or the conjunction 'whether'; the third one means "knows".
mężczyzna = husband + whether + knows = whether the husband knows :-) This is the question!
It's infinitely more phonetic than English - and a great many other languages. Learn the rules and develop your ear, and you'll spell things perfectly.
Can someone explain the 'zcz' part? To an English or German brain it sounds like the letters 'sht' 'scht'. Is zcz all one sound or is it two sounds? And if it's two sounds, are they 'sh' and 't', and does zc make the first sound and z make the second? Or does z make the first sound and cz the second? Sorry, just so confused, just trying to understand... :P :P
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It's not "zcz." It is "Ż," sounds like "zh" in English followed by "CZ," which sounds like "ch" in English.
So it sounds like menZH-CHizna in English
It's exactly like you said but most of polish people would say it with sz (pronounced as sh) instead of ż in this particular word
In syllables - męż-czyz-na. It sounds a bit like mensh-chi-znah, I think? "Cz" is one sound, like you said.
Ą is pronounced like 'dONc' in French, 'sONg' in English, or 'marrOM' in Portuguese (also 'marrON' in French)
Ę is pronounced like 'sINge' and 'cINq' in French
It's easy to say it:M e sh ch y(i sound) z n (nasal A,like on).I'm slavic and I know it
Is the (female) computer voice pronouncing it correctly?
It sounds to me as if she is accenting the first syllable: MĘŻ-czyz-na -- I would have expected męż-CZYZ-na.
The TTS doesn't really pay much attention to the stress, unfortunately. But almost all words in Polish are stressed on the penultimate syllable.
"pan" is something between "man" and "gentleman" (none of those really seems to be a good translation), and "pan" is even accepted here, but generally "ten pan" (this [gentle/]man) would be better, as "pan" on its own is a form of Formal You.
Polish doesn't have articles -- no indefinite articles like "a, an" and no definite articles like "the".
So just mężczyzna on its own can be used where English would use one of
- man
- a man
- the man
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What is the sound of the "z" with the dot on its top? I cant hear out while watching and listening to the word.
In English this would be transcribed as ZH, probably.
It's the sound 's' makes in "pleasure", I'd say.
I really want to learn this language but my brain can't handle the spelling. 0-0
Well, if you have a "gender" question in a questionnaire, I believe that the answers can be "male"/"female"... while we would use "kobieta"/"mężczyzna".
It's still strange that it got suggested for you.
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I can't find the symbols on my phone to answer the questions. I only seem to have the French & Spanish accents etc. Any suggestions how i get the symbols needed for Polush?
They marked me down cause of no capitilization
No. Duolingo ignores capitalisation. You must have made some other mistake.
Do you have a screenshot of your answer that you can show us?
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Does any one else have the problem where it takes a heart if you click "can't listen now"?
It's been a few days since you wrote that and I hope the bug is solved already, please let us know if it still persists.
At the risk of going off topic, I've just learned that the singular for man is "mężczyzna," while the plural is "mężczyźni." Why does the plural have a diacritical mark over the second "z" and the singular does not?
Why does the plural have a diacritical mark over the second "z" and the singular does not?
The -i ending causes palatalisation of the preceding consonant cluster.
That means that the z sound turns into a ź sound and the n sound into a ń sound.
ń before an i sound is written ni, so the n doesn't change its written form even as it changes pronunciation, but the ź sound has to be written like that (not like zi as it would be before a vowel) since it is followed by a consonant.
I am almost tempted to quote from the Harry Belafonte song, "It was clear as mud but it covered the ground..." but I think I do get it. Thank you so much for your prompt and somewhat recondite explanation!
I still don't know why they don't accept 'pan' for man (sir) or 'pani' for woman (miss).
I cant get used to this = zcz Oh poland why, why such difficulty i only want to communicate
Are the Z with a dot and the Z with a dash on top pronounced differently? Or is it simply orthographic? :)
Are the Z with a dot and the Z with a dash on top pronounced differently?
Yes. For example, żali (się) "he complains" and ziali "they breathed" sound different to a Pole. (Remember that zia is pronounced like źa.)
They represent sounds that don't exist exactly in English, though, which is why most English speakers hear them as "the same sound": the "zh" sound as in "vision" or "measure".
