"Jestem dziadkiem!"
Translation:I am a grandfather!
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"em" or "iem" are the endings for both masc. and neut. Instr.
you use "em" except when the stem ends in a velar (g or k), when you use "iem". There's a spelling rule in Polish that you should try and avoid "e" after velars...
"The letter e is usually separated from a preceding k or g by i,"
Swan, Oscar (2008-10-12). Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar, Second Edition (Verbs and Essentials of Grammar Series) (Kindle Location 201). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.
The notes about the instrumental case back in those exercise were a bit sketchy a while back but they've tightened them up a bit since...
According to this wikipedia article, it is an irregular noun (scroll down passed 'Neuter Nouns'), but possibly only in the plural sense. As far as I can tell, it doesn't explicitly tell what gender the word is, or how it declines. I think it may be because of hard/soft sounds, but I am not entirely sure. Article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_morphology#Nouns
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So is the root word for 'male' dzi? We have dziecko and dziadkiem for boy and grandfather respectively.
They seem to share that syllable. Is that an accurate deduction or am I looking for patterns when there aren't any?
Yeah, I'm afraid that's an overinterpretation :)
First of all, the letter 'i' is part of a spelling convention to indicate the softening (palatalisation) of the preceding consonant, so in this particular case it's not the end of the syllable. The first syllable here is /dzia/, which is different from /dziec/.
Secondly, dziecko only means child, not specifically a boy, as that would be chłopiec/chłopczyk.
If we go back to Proto-Slavic, we see that both words appear to be unrelated, although there is of course no way to be 100% sure, as those are all reconstructions:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/d%C4%9Bd%D1%8A
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/d%C4%9Bt%D1%8C