Is there any good way to know what gender a noun is?
You have to look at the ending of a word;
Ending -consonant: masculine Ending -a: feminine Ending -e, -o, -um: neuter
...I think
Some nouns with ending "-a" are masculine (e.g. mężczyzna, artysta)
Just in some cases, like this one. Suffix -nie = Neuter.
Why "The food is good" when it could have been "food is good"
Why not? Both are correct (and accepted) and they translate into Polish the same way.
Someone had to say it
Though Duo accepted "The food's good", it said I'd "missed a space".
That's what I thought it should be but I could swear she was pronouncing an 'a' at the end of the first and last words.
Yeah it sounds very clearly like "dobra" and not "dobre," which seems very odd?
The question is: what kind of 'a' do you have in mind when writing that it sounds like 'dobra'? And what kind of 'e'? Cause it surely doesn't sound like Polish 'a', all the audio files sound correct to me.
How do you know when you should use dobry, dobra or dobre?
The adjective has to match the gender and number of the noun it refers to. Here the noun is jedzenie, which is neuter singular.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dobry#Declension_2