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- "Czy możesz przynieść chleb i…
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What about 'could you bring bread and wine'? Or does 'musieć' mean physical ability to do something? If yes, how do you construct a similar sentence with the meaning of polite request ("could you...") ?
It's not 'musieć' (must, have to), it's 'móc' (may, be able to, sometimes 'can'). Just for the record, the declension is here.
The more polite version, corresponding to 'could you', uses conditional. A quick look in the declension table, and we arrive at "Czy mógłbyś przynieść chleb i wino?" :)
And then of course there's plural 'you', so respectively 'możecie' and 'moglibyście'/'mogłybyście' (first one for masculine personal, the other for not masculine-personal).
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"Could" and "mógłbyś" are grammatically equivalent, true, but they are not equivalent in usage & meaning. Most of the time when in Polish we use "możesz?", in English a person would say "could you?".
Given how this website works and what method it uses, sometimes we have to be very strict in terms of grammar to make sure our learners know exactly what is what. Obviously if you were translating some real Polish text and translated it the way you mentioned that would indeed be a natural translation.
Written "can you bring bread and wine" Suggested "can you bring bread and wine" :D
So actually it seems okay, at least without a context. Added "get" and "fetch".
how would one say, 'Can you bring some bread?' Just curious since there are no articles, is there a different way of saying 'can you bring the bread?, can you bring some bread? etc ' or are they the same
You use different case for that - see this thread. In short - '..przynieść chleba' (partitive case).
I'd just say "trochę chleba", although yes, the partitive "chleba" is possible as well. I think it's rather not accepted in the course if "some" wasn't mentioned.
May I ask if English is your native language, or if your sense of interpreting it comes from the culture nurtured in any English speaking country?
No, I'm Polish and I've spent my entire life here. My English is pretty good, I believe, but it's definitely not native-like. We have natives helping us decide in some cases, so unless the answer is totally obvious, usually my comment is written after a consultation.
Actually now we very often do accept "some". English seems to use it a lot more often than Polish uses "trochę". Some things simply change with time and things about our policy that I wrote months ago may not be true anymore.
So as for your longest comment: yeah, now we do not have anything against "some" anymore. "any" is also usually accepted if it makes sense on its own in English. It's just that our database is quite big and not every sentence has been edited yet. Added "some" here.
Thank you for your reply, dziękuje. Honestly, I have no idea how Duolingo works inside. When I lose virtual hearts in the app in such cases as I've described, it almost hurts. I hope the more people drill through the course and provide their feedback, the more of fun it can become, provided there is also a technical team on the other side to make it perfect.
If you think about it, "will you" and "can you" are quite different.
"You will bring" is the future tense of "you bring," so the same future tense would translate into the Polish
Czy przyniesiesz chleb i wino?
