"Sorry, I did not hear you."
Translation:Przepraszam, nie usłyszałem was.
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Can I say "nie was usłyszałam" instead of "nie usłyszałam was"? Why not, if not?
Yes and no. Yes, because it's technically a correct sentence, but no, because it means something different. It means "It is not you that I heard. I heard someone else."
It's basically the case of what you negate - you just negated 'you' instead of the whole notion of 'hearing you'.
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Why cant you say "was nie usłaszyłem" (im sure i spelled it wrong, but you get what I mean)
It's very rare to start a sentence with a pronoun other than the subject pronoun. Your sentence ("Was nie usłyszałem") is as natural as "You I haven't heard". Like "I heard Susan, I heard Mort, you I haven't heard". So... not very probable.
Thanks Jellei. I think I get it - I've gotten so used to putting the direct object pronoun before the verb to avoid it being at the end of the sentence that I didn't notice I put the pronoun between the 'nie' and the verb. I was thinking, I always put the pronoun before the verb and it's never changed the meaning before, why suddenly here? Is Polish out to get me? :-P But, of course, the connection between the 'nie' and the verb it's negating seems to be very important, and the fact that you can actually put something in between in this sentence and it doesn't become gramatically incorrect is unusual. But at the very least it changes the meaning of the sentence.
That's of course correct, but let me just add that the emphatic (longer) forms are mandatory after prepositions, even if unstressed.
Why include the "ja" the verb ending already indicates the first person singular or "I"
Yeah, using 'ja' wouldn't feel very natural here, although of course it's technically correct.
How would this work if you were using 'pan' or 'pani'? Przepraszam, nie słyszałam pani! ?
"(u)słyszeć" takes Genitive, which for "pani" is still "pani", true. For "pan" it would be "Przepraszam, nie słyszałem pana".
One of them surely had to be there, otherwise you can't answer. And no one has proven so far that it really wasn't possible to create any of the starred answers.
It would give too much emphasis, which in such a sentence doesn't really make sense. Kinda like "I did not hear YOU - but I did hear THEM".
What if you didn't put ciebie at the end? Przepraszam, ciebie nie słyszałem. That reduces the emphasis on ciebie, so would that be acceptable?
Actually... it gives more emphasis on 'ciebie'. Why? Mostly because if you consider the clauses separately (they could also easily be separate sentences), you put 'ciebie' at the very beginning of the clause. That's grammatically okayish (but note that 'cię' absolutely couldn't be put here), but as quite often in sentences that the learners write, it looks like "Her - I heard, him - I heard, You - I didn't hear". Ergo: too weird.
My natural instinct is to put it at the end, I was just wondering how the different placement would effect it. (Also I can think of situations where the effect 'I heard them but not you' (or, more to the point, 'I didn't hear YOU') would be perfectly valid. Granted this isn't the norm though.) Bardzo dziękuje
Tak, zgadzam się. Ale niech pan, panie Jellei, powie to Duo, bo ten ptak w tym właśnie ćwiczeniu "przykro mi" odmawia się przyjmować. )
Przeszedłem już przez całe Polskie drzewo umiejętności i zobaczyłem tego ptaka w pięknym szaliku. Pewien czas miałem ambicje powiększyć te cyfry obok Polskiej flagi, ale robiło się nudno raz za razem powtarzać te same ćwiczenia. Dlatego próbowałem urozmaicić sobie to spędzanie czasu i pozwalałem sobie eksperymentować z różnymi słowami, których się nauczyłem. Panu osobiście chcę wyrazić pięknie dzięki za cierpliwość i szybkie odpowiedzi i rozjaśnienia.
Likely i will figure this out later but could someone explain the difference between "usłyszałam" and "słyszałem"
This had the wrong gender voice (female, in this case, where it should be male). Many other exercises in this section also have this problem. I'm marking them "audio is incorrect," is this how I should be reporting them?
I'm slowly going through the whole tree to ensure the right voice is reading the sentences - just as a reminder, that's a very new option, until recently both voices could read any sentence. I just tagged this sentence. I generally want to go through the course from the beginning, but given how heavily gendered this particular skill is, I'll go through all of it now. The changes should be implemented on the users' side in a few days.
I put "was" before nie. Is this wrong for the same reason that ciebie is wrong..due to emphasis. Or is there another reason?