"Those men and this woman are eating dinner."
Translation:Tamci mężczyźni i ta kobieta jedzą kolację.
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Tamci is masculine personal, tamte is non-masculine-personal.
I thought "kolacja" was dinner and "obiad" was lunch? But now I'm reading "obiad" is dinner and "kolacja" is supper. In English, we don't really have this distinction. What's the difference in Polish, and how do you refer to the afternoon meal?
Obiad is the main meal, which takes place mid to late afternoon. Kolacja is usually a small meal in the evening. So you could call either 'dinner' depending on your local usage of the term. Best not to think of them as exactly equivalent.
Agreed. I know what each means, and because of that I selected "obiad" and not "kolacja", but it was marked incorrect because I didn't choose both.
In English, we do have the same overlaps and confusions discussed. This is noticeable, for example, in farming areas in Canada or the North of England. We might have breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the city; breakfast, dinner, and supper in the country; and on celebration days (like New Year's Eve) in some places we might have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. Polish has the same kinds of variation.
The point is they don't really correspond to meals in the English speaking world anyway. Obiad might be 3-4pm. For me that's neither lunch nor dinner. It's obiad.
Thanks for clearing that up for me, the folks that emigrated to work the marble quarries were not sad to to say very educated and there was a lot of pidgin Polish spoken. I never heard pokoj, it was always idz do twojego rumu. That and many other terms where Polish was Anglicized.
I think that obiad should be lunch (maybe late lunch) and kolacja should be either dinner or supper. That would make a lot more sense.
"Obiad" is lunch or dinner, depending on where you're from and what variety of English influenced your English most.
In Polish, "obiad" is the second of the main three meals (śniadanie, obiad, kolacja), usually the biggest one.
Didn't Duolingo say that "dinner" will refer only to the evening meal, not the midday meal?
No. It refers to both, as the matter is complicated between the natives of different dialects. But the default version is the American one, as Duolingo is an American company. Therefore the first interpretation will be 'the evening meal', but everyone has the possibility to use the British interpretation.
Dinner should not be a required translation for obiad. This is uncommon in English. Yes I know some dialects use it this way
You can always treat them like that and it should always be accepted.
Here in the UK, the word 'Dinner' is used differently in different areas. So, say, here in the North it means lunch, but further South it means the evening meal. 'Supper' can mean the main evening meal (in the South) or, here in the North, it can mean a light meal eaten later in the evening sometime after the main meal. Often the main evening meal is called 'Tea'. Now you would think that tea is something you drink, yes, but it is also a meal. So you can drink tea while you eat your tea. If that sounds confusing, just try to understand the game of cricket and you will have mastered how the British think. And you thought that Polish was difficult? (Don't, just don't ask how our political system works, OK! That's even more confusing.)
What is the relationship between , tamci and tamte, I never heard tamci as a kid.
"tamci" is masculine personal plural. You need to use it with nouns like "mężczyźni", "ludzie", "chłopcy" and other nouns describing 'groups with at least one man'.
"tamte" is for everything else.
"ten" is a masculine singular variant of this determiner, "ta" is feminine singular. The determiner needs to match the noun it describes, so "ten kobieta" makes no sense, grammatically.
It's similar in Spanish actually, although it has one gender less (doesn't have neuter singular). "ten mężczyzna" = "este hombre", "ta kobieta" = "esta mujer", "ci mężczyźni" = "estos hombres", "te kobiety" = "estas mujeres". Only neuter "to dziecko" (this child) doesn't have its equivalent.
Why is it "kolacje" and not "kolacja" because kobieta and jedza are both feminine, no?
No, kolacja is nominative (marks the subject of the sentence) and kolację is accusative (marks the object of the sentence).
Here's a declension table: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kolacja#Declension
If you're having difficulty telling subject and object apart, then I suggest you read this comment:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/18266751?comment_id=36188190