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- Topic: Polish >
- "Widzimy dobre owoce."
22 Comments
Another one of those false friends, I keep expecting owoce to mean vegetables!
I can imagine! овочі is also vegetables in Ukrainian, and I have a feeling it's similar in Croatian, so I was totally taken aback it means fruit in Polish :)
Fruit is usually uncountable in English so should be written as 'fruit' here
I think the english translation "we can see a good fruits" it's not the most correct one. At least in a proper English grammar.
"We can see a good fruits" is not good English, no. Did it come up as an alternate?
The indefinite article isn't used with plurals in English, and there's no verb for 'can' in the Polish sentence here.
As an English speaker I would translate this sentence as, "We see good fruit" (as in, "we see good fruit over there", pointing at the fruit), or more correctly "We can see good fruit". It would also be correct to say, "We can see the good fruit" as opposed to the bad fruit. However, you would never say "fruits" as has already been explained previously.
no, it did not show up as an alternate, the alternate, however, was also wrong, "we see good fruits"
As far as I know, "fruits" is perfectly fine in the botanical sense, when describing different types of them.
you are correct when saying something like "there are different types of fruits" but i see this in a more survival kind of way. when surviving you tend to say "we see good fruit". at least i would. would a native english speaker confirm? my memory tends to be a bit weak.
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Which is really more natural here – we rather rarely use „widzimy” with objects outside of 1)questions 2)tour guides, so „Widzimy dobre owoce” is something I would expect to be said by a tour guide to botanical garden trip.
In fact, language like that was always my major annoyance with guided tours/trips – my immediate reaction to something like „Po prawej widzimy Ołtarz z 15 wieku wykonany przez ucznia […]” is wish to answer with „Nie, nie widzimy, bo akurat nie patrzymy w tym kierunku”. :P
I would(and most of my friends too) say: „Po prawej możemy zobaczyć […]” and I think it's actually some kind of stylistic rule in Polish, but not sure.
In surviving? Don't know what that's supposed to mean. But yeah, "fruit" is singular and plural. Unless there are multiple types of fruit, then that would be when to say "fruits". That's what we do where I'm from, anyway :/
In British English, at least, using fruit as a mass noun is more usual and correct, but using it as if it's countable is becoming more common, and it's my impression that it's more common in American English. In my experience, at least, it's really not particularly unusual for an American to say fruits in a situation where, as a Brit, I would certainly say fruit.
And there are occasions when fruits is grammatically correct even in British, absolutely fundamentally correct English.
At any rate, as long as "we see good fruit" is also accepted (which it should be, by this point, I'm sure it's been reported), then I don't see it as a huge problem.
Yeah, of course it works :) I also made "We see good fruit" an equally good 'best answer'.
Deleted options with 'a good fruit' because that would mean a singular fruit and that's not what the Polish sentence says.
The example above is a correct answer although the word fruit is already plural. The answer Duo Lingo wants is we can see good fruits which is not correct.
I typed “We see a good fruit” and it was counted as incorrect. What is the singular word for fruit then if it isn’t “owoce”?
"owoc". It's masculine. And then "owoce" is plural. And then you have English with its weird plural identical to singular thing :/
True. But doesn’t Polish do that weird thing with Fish? What’s the singular for Ryby?
Ryba. I do not recall if there is any noun in Polish which has singular identical to plural (pluralia tantum words don't count as they do not have singular).
