"To jest duże."
Translation:This is big.
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Ok, I thought I had a grasp on these demonstrative pronouns, but now I'm confused. Can 'To' when not being used to modify a noun not be translated as 'that'? Because I answered 'That is big' and was marked wrong.
I saw another comment in that skill that explained 'To' was either this or that. In fact, their explanation compared it to Spanish esto/eso/aquel [this/that/that (over there)] where the Polish equivalent should be to/to/tamto. Is this not correct?
If you want to say for example 'It/This/That is my shirt' you can say 'To jest moja koszula'. There isn't really any difference in translation between 'this' and 'that' in this context so you should report it if 'that is..' is marked wrong. Btw. you can also omit the verb and say 'To moja koszula', but the first one sounds equally natural.
It would work as a translation of "It is big", like. "This is a child. It is big", but we rather rarely use the pronon "ono". Vengir wrote something about it here.
"to" is a neuter form of "this" as a determiner. Like in "this wine", "this animal", "this child" (to wino, to zwierzę, to dziecko).
But in such a sentence, "this" is not a determiner, it's a dummy pronoun. And "jest" will be needed in most examples. (Yeah, most. Sometimes it can be omitted, but it's actually hard to pinpoint any rule as to 'when' it can be omitted. But for example you can say "To ciekawe" for "This is interesting" and it sound fine without 'jest', but "To duże" doesn't really sound well).
Hmmm. Somehow I think that it would be translated a bit differently, but for that we'd need context... I don't know. The thing is, that "To jest duże" is not a very likely Polish sentence. And 'to' in this sentence just seems so... unspecific. Meanwhile English "one" makes it clear that we know what we're talking about and we just mentioned it... so I'd probably say "Jest duży/duża/duże" and omit "to" because the subject seems already known.