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- Topic: Polish >
- "She is a woman."
"She is a woman."
Translation:Ona jest kobietą.
32 Comments
Is there a way of knowing how a word will turn in the instrumental based on the nominative? Should one assume that all words that end in -a in the nominative get a A-ogonek in the instrumental, or the rules are wilder than that? Thank you for your answers and for your incredible work :)
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Instrumental is the most regular case, has fewest rules and no exceptions. a→ą is indeed correct.
it is a name of case. Polish language has 7 cases- Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Locative and Vocative.
That means every noun has potentially 14 forms (usually some look the same, but which changes between words).
Instrumental is a form that theoretlically answers question "using what?" but it is also used after certain verbs and prepositions.
One of those verbs are być=to be and zostać=to become.
Which basically means- you need to look up "instrumental/narzędnik" form of noun to use after "jestem/jesteś/jest/jesteście/jesteśmy/są"
And this form of noun KOBIETA is KOBIETĄ
So unlike Russian and Ukrainian, I see that Polish uses "to be" in the present tense. Is this unique to Polish or do other Slavic languages do this too?
We use verb "to be" in present tense in Croatian. Jesam/sam = am Jesi/si = (you - singular) are Jest/je = is Jesmo/smo = (we) are Jeste/ste = (you - plural) are Jesu/su = (they) are The shortened form is used almost always
Like Croats, we do the same in Serbian. Additionally, we use two alphabets - Latin (so we can read Croatian which is very similar to Serbian) and Cyrillic (makes it easy for us to read Russian). Confusing enough ?!??!?!?
On Android, I suggest installing the app called SwiftKey - you can have up to 5 languages on one keyboard (just hold the 'basic letter' for a moment and the special characters appear).
On iPhone, I believe they are just there automatically, again, just hold the 'basic letter'.
Sometimes if you press and hold a letter the options with the different accents will pop up over the letter, then you just slide along to the one you want. Good luck! :)
On Android you can simply install the Google Keyboard and enable the Polish QWERTY keyboard.
late to the party here but when do you use each one of those? Is one more casual than the other or is it just personal preference?
I think that in most situations the Instrumental form is better. In fact, we don't even accept "Ona to kobieta" because we believe it just sounds too clumsy if on the left side there's a personal pronoun.
The Instrumental variant is more... descriptive, while the Nominative one kinda sounds like "She = woman".
Well kobieta is like "this woman" ye and thats all i can say , sorry if this did not help you
Everytime I write the "a" it says that it is wrong. Anybody have any suggestions??
I'm sorry, but your question is not really specific, where do you put "a", what's your whole answer?
"kobieta" is Nominative - the basic, dictionary form of the noun, used mostly for the subject of the sentence.
"kobietą" is Instrumental - used mostly after "with" and in sentences like this one (She is a woman).
You learn verb with cases it needs. Or cases with most popular verbs.
With is=jest the rule is
jest noun (instrumental)
to/(to jest)/(jest to) noun (nominative)
jest adjective (nominative)
