"They have children."
Translation:Oni mają dzieci.
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no, if at leas one male is in the group - use oni. it can be 1 man and 10 women - oni
How can I tell when to use the different "haves" like mają, ma, mam, mammy, and masz?
Every grammatical person has a different form.
I have = (ja) mam
You (sg.) have = (ty) masz
He/She/It has = (on/ona/ono) ma
We have = (my) mamy
You (pl.) have = (wy) macie
They have = (oni/one) mają
Question: if you did not need to specify which type of "they" you mean (I can't currently think of an example...maybe if you didn't know the genders of those in the group?), would you be able to merely say "Mają dzieci."? Or is it a rule that you have to specify whether the group contains a male or not?
Cheers
3rd person pronouns are the ones that are less often omitted, but they still can. Either because of what you said, or just because "they" were just mentioned in the previous sentence so we know perfectly well who they are.
Is dzieci in the accusative plural neuter? I'm confused as to why the ending for dziecko in the accusative plural neuter is not with an -a...so dziecka?
Yes, it is Accusative plural... well, it's not exactly neuter, because we don't think in terms of masculine/feminine/neuter in plural, but of course the singular word "dziecko" is neuter, so basically you're right.
"dziecka" is a correct form, but for a singular "child". It's Genitive.
So 'dzieci' in the accusative plural is a 'weird' case? Because neuter accusative nouns should end with -a. For example: jabłko vs jabłka (Oni mają jabłka). With that being said, I assumed the above sentence should be: Oni mają dziecka.
Yeah, I guess it's an exception, 'cause most neuter nouns do indeed end with -a in Nominative/Accusative plural (and therefore are identical to Genitive singular).
2480
I am not sure you are asking the question that pye20 is answering. The ą is there at the end because the subject is the third person singular, "they." Indo-European languages change their verbs to indicate the subject of the verb, though in English this is quite limited. Our verb "to have" only has different forms for the third person singular, he, she, or it "has." It looks like you are doing a bit of Russian as well, though, another Slavic language, so you will see similarly conjugated verbs there. There is no real verb to have in modern Russian (you may see the word related to the Polish one, иметь, if you get a bit more advanced), but you will see они иду́т, for instance, for "they go," as opposed to я иду́ (I go) or он идёт (he goes). This verb conjugation (that's what the changing form is called) will be one of the most important things you learn early on in any new language.
