"Duzi chłopcy i mali chłopcy."
Translation:The big boys and the little boys.
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Is it not dużi chłopcy? according to this ż in duże changes to z in plural, I am seeing this change for the first time, can someone confirm?
As far as grammar is concerned, the only thing that changes, is the ending, which becomes -i. The rest is just phonology and spelling conventions. In Polish, "i" is an palatalizing (softening) vowel, which means that it softens at least one preceding consonant. So in this case, ż is being softened to ź. Furthermore, spelling convention dictates that ź,ć, ś and ń are written without the diacritical mark, when followed by the letter i. This is why it's duzi, but the z is still pronounced as ź.
Here you'll find some more rules in the comments.
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That didn't asnwer the question - it just linked back to this thread. Why do you have to say "THE" before 'boys' and 'girls' ?
I am wondering if you can't just drop the first 'boys' in English because it would sound better, but I understand if it is just to make sure it is translated almost literally
I would say that it depends on what a person saying the sentence want to emphasize.
You could say "The big and little boys" (Duzi i mali chłopcy) when describing a group of boys of random height.
At the same time you could say "The big boys and (the) little boys" (Duzi chłopcy i mali chłopcy) when you want to distinguish two groups of boys depending on their height.
It all depends on the context.
Right, it's incorrect :| Was it a listening exercise? Those currently don't inform you that you made a typo.
The fact that this should be rejected and not treated as a typo is a different thing...
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So, how I have understanded this, is that masculine-personal only changes in plural to (for example) mali, but every other gender it is małe?
Yes! "małe" works for: plurals of feminine nouns, plurals of neuter nouns, plurals of masculine nouns that are not for people.
Shouldn't it rather be "The big boys and the little boys"? The omission of the second definite article does not seem logical, nor sounds natural.
I think it's fine this way, but I can add "the" to the main answer, why not.
That's just not what it really means, even if perhaps someone could treat them as synonyms in some context. But "tall" here would be "wysocy".
Most likely "duzi chłopcy" is about their age. They are still 'boys', but (compared to others at least) they are older, e.g. in primary school already.