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- Topic: Polish >
- "Chciałbym mieć psa."
12 Comments
592
There's a sightly different meaning in English. "I would like to have a dog" simply means that I think it would be nice to have a dog. The sentence makes perfect sense on its own.
But your version doesn't really work on its own and seems to be answering a hypothetical question:
"If you could have any animal you liked as a pet, what would you choose?"
"I would want to have a dog"
But I don't know if that difference would be made in Polish.
It could be the same situation. Although the choose of the verb seems a bit strange both in English and Polish, why not "I would choose" or even "I would prefer"?
- 592
Both fine, but I was trying to find a context where somebody might say "I would want to have a dog". I don't see anything strange about using "have" here, especially as the question was "If you could have ...?" (and I think that's how we'd normally put the queston - plenty of examples on the web)
The thing is that it implies a condition, which "I would like to have a dog" doesn't. OK, another example might be, "If we're going to keep hens, I would want to have a dog, what with all the foxes round here."
- 592
"I wish I had a dog" has a slightly different meaning to "I would like to have a dog". The second simply means that you want to have a dog, sometime in the (perhaps near) future.
Whereas "I wish ..." means that you regret that you don't have a dog now. This is close to "If only ...", and I think a better translation would be "Gdybym tylko miał psa".
Hmmm... well, especially if you finish the sentence with "...", it does make sense indeed. OK, added now.
You don't really need the 'to have' in the English sentence. Simply I would like a dog has the same meaning.
Yes, but we prefer to keeping this verb especially that Polish could also omit "mieć", so the construction becomes too different.
