"The new men know that woman."
Translation:Nowi mężczyźni znają tamtą kobietę.
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"kobietą" is Instrumental, it's used mostly after the preposition "z" ("with") and in sentences like "She is a woman".
"kobietę" is Accusative, it's used for the direct object of the sentence.
Im having trouble with the accents. Dpes anyone have any tips to help me with them? Or is it just a case of getting used to them over time?
I'm Okay reading and pronouncing them but when it comes to spelling the words (like mezczyzni that has 3 accents in it) I'm always getting them wrong. We have nothing like that in English and there's so many different ones in polish! I know that spelling is low on the priorities list right now but I'd like to keep my streak going :p In speech I know mezcyzna, mezczyzni plus the other variations all sound quite similar so if I were to use the wrong tense at least the basic word is correct and it's understandable
I had a feeling there was no shortcut :p Thanks for replying though, hopefully it'll sink in eventually
My recommendation is to keep writing them out (or typing, using http://polish.typeit.org/ or similar). When we had the timed exercises, my time would run out by the time I had typed the word (!). Keep practising and you'll get there!
I used „ta” instead of „tamtą”. I thought that the „ten” words meant „this” and „that”. Am I correct?
It goes like this in general: [ten/ten/tamten] (and its forms) = [this/that/that].
So this exercise accepts the literal translation "tamtą", as well as "tę" (this is the only exception when those forms have a difference other than adding "tam-").
"ta" is simply the wrong case, you need Accusative.
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When I first started I worked out that piję with the accent meant "I drink" and that pije was different, and that most of the "I" forms use the ę at the end. What does the ę actually do to differentiate for example mężczyzną/kobietą and mężczyznę/kobietę? Thank you.
With nouns, -ę is usually the ending for feminine nouns in Accusative case, and -ą for feminine nouns in Instrumental case.
"mężczyzna", meaning "a man", is definitely not a feminine noun, but still, it looks like one, so it has the same endings.
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Perhaps I didn't explain my query properly, for example pije and piję are the same (to me) word apart from the accent, so why does one mean I myself drink, what is the ę doing to show that its ME doing the drinking as opposed to say mężczyznę which is just a man. Perhaps there isn't an explanation....
Firstly, I would say that it's not a good idea to think of the special characters as 'accents', because they're really different sounds. It's not like a/á in Spanish, where it's indeed mostly a matter of stress.
Also, comparing verbs and nouns doesn't make much sense to me. -ę happens to be a common 1st person singular verb ending. It also happens to be the usual ending for Accusative of feminine nouns. That doesn't mean the two are connected. Just like in Spanish there's no connection between '-o' in "yo escribo" and '-o' in "soy alto"
Finally, "pije" and "piję" actually do sound the same for most natives. If -ę is the final sound of the word, we pronounce it as if it was normal -e. We only pronounce it 'more clearly' if it's in the middle of the word (there are no words starting with it).
I got it wrong by writing 'nowego mężczyźni.' Having a little trouble with that to be honest. Is nowego for singular masculine nouns?
Well, it is, but it's for another grammatical case.
"the new men" are the subject here. The subject takes Nominative (the basic case). The right, virile ('masculine personal plural') form is "nowi".
"nowego" is either Genitive masculine or Accusative for masculine animate nouns. If this was "The new men know a new man", then it would be "Nowi mężczyźni znają nowego mężczyznę".