"Are you a cat?"

Translation: Jesteś kotem?

[Weird_Ed]

Tak, jestem kotem. Miau

[PeaceAndWar208]

Nie, ja jestem psem.

[Peppercorn11]

Ja też. Woof

[alex_tv80]

Czy pan est kotem?

[Matthew_Phelps]

Cats are dignified creatures after all.

[va-diim]

jest*

[illirina]

jesteś kotką? -
why not?? i'm a girl!

[Jellei]

We usually don't accept the 'second gender' words for animals, but somehow I do add "kotka" everywhere... so yeah, I can add it here as well.

[dudeski123]

Asked no sane person ever.. x)

[dschla88]

What would be the difference between "Jesteś kotem?" and "Ty to kot?"

[silmeth]

(I wrote it about statements, but the same applies to questions, only the intonation is different and in writing there is a question mark at the end ;-))

When speaking about first (I, we) or second (you) person, one uses verb to be (być) with instrumental to connect subject and predicate. So (ja) jestem psem (I am a dog), (ty) jesteś człowiekiem (thou art a man), (my) jesteśmy fantastami (we are sci-fi fans), (wy) jesteście graczami (you are gamers).

When speaking about third person (somebody or something else), then it is popular to connect subject and predicate by neuter pronoun to: ona to pies or ona jest psem (she is a dog), krzesła to meble or krzesła są meblami (chairs are furnitures) etc.

Clauses like ty to kot are perfectly understandable, but they sound very unnatural.

[Vengir]

Emphasis for sure; the second form emphasize te subject more. But as a native, I've never encouterd the second form used in a question, so I'm not entirely sure it's correct.

[mskycc3]

Da! Jestem kotem!!!

[Vengir]

„Tak”, not „Da”. «Да» is a word in Russian. In Polish „da” has completely different meaning.

[va-diim]

Jak mówię rosyjskie słowo "так" (meaning "like so") po polsku?

[Vengir]

Tak samo. :)

Polish „tak” can mean both "yes" and "like (so)".

[Hazzy56505]

Czy ty to kot

[Jellei]

We don't use the 'to' construction with personal pronouns.

[AntonFarga]

I wrote "Czy ty to kot?" And it said thay it was wrong. My Polish girlfriend said that my answer was correct, actually

[Jellei]

We just consider using the 'to' construction after a personal pronoun to be very, very clumsy.

Let's take a more probable sentence: You are a man. I googled "ty jesteś mężczyzną" and got 23 000 results. Then I checked "ty to mężczyzna" and although at first it gave quite a big number of results, going to the 2nd page actually shows that the number of results is... 11. And a few of them aren't even exactly what I was trying to search for.

[Carlos875574]

Can we say instead:

Czy ty jestes kotem?

[Jellei]

"ty" is very redundant, bus yes, that sentence is correct.

[Royislearning]

Back to the costume party,

Kid 1 to Kid 2: Jesteś tygrysem.
Kid 2: Tak :)
Kid 3 to kid 2: Jesteś kotem?
Kid 2 to kid 3: Nie! Jestem tygrysem!
Kid 2:.. tygrys jest kotem. :"(

(Im just continuing an idea from another thread don't mind me..)