"This animal is a tiger."
Translation:To zwierzę jest tygrysem.
34 Comments
Is this stuff actually explained anywhere except in the comments? Am i missing half of duolingo, or is guessing and getting these wrong hundreds of times supposed to make it stick?
First lessons have tips¬es on the website. Later it's comments + discussion posts. Supposedly duolingo way is learning by examples. Tips and Notes will probably come one day, but as of now nobody knows when.
:o I've been doing it all in my mobile so haven't seen any supporting material...!
Back to the start then!
The two starred answers are "To zwierzę to tygrys" and "To zwierzę jest tygrysem". You should be able to create one of those.
I have the same issue, jest is not an option and 'to' doesn't count as a good answer. Which means we can't continue the lesson ..
Can't you really create any of those options I put? Can you upload a screenshot? If "To zwierzę to tygrys" was rejected, it must've been a bug, but they certainly do happen sometimes.
Ditto here. "Jest" was not given as one of the options to choose from and my answer was marked incorrect with "To zwierzę jest tygrysem" given as the corrected answer.
ERROR: In Duolingo the word 'jest' is not an option, so only I could do 'To zwierze to tygrysem' and this won't count as good. Everytime this happens I have to stop the app and hope they don't ask it again.
So just to get this straight...
I use 'jest' with the long form of the noun (e.g. Tyrgysem) and 'to' with the short form of the noun (e.g. tygrys) but both 'jest' and 'to' mean 'to be/is' in this sentence?
Thinking of 'short' and 'long' forms of the noun won't get you anywhere, I'm afraid. You really have to think in terms of the grammatical cases. This sentence here is an example of a simple "X is Y" sentence, with both X (This animal) and Y (a tiger) being noun phrases. If you have a sentence like that, with two noun phrases, you can translate it into Polish in two ways:
- X in Nominative + a form of 'być' + Y in Instrumental: To zwierzę jest tygrysem.
or
- X in Nominative + to + Y in Nominative: To zwierzę to tygrys.
Note that the first 'to' is a pronoun 'this' for a neuter noun, but the second 'to' means 'is'/'are'.
I don't know how much of this you already knew, but I just wanted to clarify everything (I hope).
Thank you so much for the detailed response, I think this is gonna take a while of just drilling different tenses, and for me, a whole different concept of grammatical structures (never did a Slavic language before!)
When is it inappropriate to use one or the other of these forms... Like why not just use jest or "bys" instead of to
"byś"? That's like a conditional form...
Anyway, check out this post: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16373167
in this sentence yes. if you can access tips¬es, read this https://www.duolingo.com/skill/pl/Defining
"to" is useful, but can be used only in noun is noun sentences. Also there are more "long" forms of w noun. this one is called instrumental. (there are 14 forms in theory, but in reality some are the same so tygrys has 6+5=11 forms
Thanks for your kind words :) But actually I just reread my comment and saw that I made a big mistake in the second translation option (I put a wrong case for Y before) - corrected it now, so you may want to take another look.
What's the difference between "to" and "jest", if we use it in a sentence like this? I mean, we can say "to zwierzę to tygrysem" and "to zwierzę to tygrysem", right?
Well, you wrote the same sentence twice, so... ;) And it's an ungrammatical sentence.
You can say "To zwierzę to tygrys" or "To zwierzę jest tygrysem". They mean basically the same, although we could say that the first one is a bit more like "This animal = a tiger" and the second one is a bit more descriptive.
You can, but it doesn't make much sense ;) Grammatically it's fine. But it means "An animal is a tiger", without specifying which animal, and most animals aren't tigers. So semantically it's rather wrong.
