"Ciasteczka są smaczne."
Translation:Cookies are tasty.
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"Są" reminded me of the Portuguese "são", which is pronounced similarly and means exactly the same. There must be a general rule for all languages starting with "Po" ;)
Not only for the languages starting with "Po" :D but for many-many others langauges. For example, sont in French, son in Spanish, суть [sut] in Old Russian. mgaristova seems to be totally right, it must be the oldest verb :D
Indeed. And it isn't limited to Romance or Slavic languages. German "sind" has clearly the same origin.
I think that it is a very old form that is common to most Indo-European languages.
Yes, the irregular third-person-plural for "to be" is one of the old Indo-European features that was preserved in both Slavic and Latin.
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In Bulgarian, they are is са ( pronounced "sа"), also.
As Arthur pointed out below, there are broadly similar sounds for "they are" in French, Spanish (which I knew / know) and old Russian (which I didn't.)
I might add that in Romanian, sunt means "they are" (it means I am, too.)
If anything else comes to mind, I'll let you know :-) :-) :-)
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I agree, it sounds very simimiar with the nasal sound in the end, I thought the same! Not so much, although similar, son and sont, in spanish and french
What form of 'smaczne' is this? I thought it should be in its feminie form of 'smaczna' as is 'Ciasteczka'
ciasteczko is neuter, ciasteczka are plural not masculine personal.
smaczne is a form for singular neuter and plural not masculine personal
So can I say that : the adjective form will not change if it's a singular or plural of the same word? Ciasteczko jest smaczne. Ciasteczka są smaczne. Is it right?
It will not change in this example (when the singular form is neuter), but it will for masculine and feminine nouns. Even here I'd advice to think about those two "smaczne" as different forms that just happen to be identical.
Thank you! It's not accepted. I should have requested that it be added. I will on the next go round.
We used to consider it: one one hand, stronger than "tasty", and on the other hand - also a bit too colloquial. But recently we've decided to accept it. Added.
I don't understand the question... it just is. Every word of this sentence is plural.
Yes and no. It translates to "are", but "are" is used for multiple grammatical persons (2nd singular and all plural ones), while "są" is only 3rd person plural.
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Please can Jellei congugate the verb - to be- so that I don't have to guess the appropriate endings. :)
I could, but I think it's generally easier for everyone if you use Wiktionary ;) It should have almost all the conjugations and declensions for the words in this course. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/by%C4%87#Verb
The -m, -ś, -śmy, -ście in the table - right now you can disregard those, that's also a possibility in many sentences but it's out of the scope of this course.
So you couldn't simply walk up to your coworkers and exclaim, "Są ciasteczka!"? :D
What would I say if I simply wanted to announce that there are cookies? Would I have to include the location in the sentence? (Of course, in English I'd probably include the location too, but not always.)
If we expected cookies, I guess "Są ciasteczka!" is enough. If it's a complete surprise, then it would surely be better to mention the location (the kitchen, probably).
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Please can you explain why it is smaczne and not smaczna.. I thought that if the word finished with an "a" then the descriptive word had the same so both "a" féminine ?
Well, that would mostly be correct for singular nouns. If it ends with -a, in 99% of cases it's feminine, and the right form of the adjective would be "smaczna".
"ciasteczka" is a plural form of "ciasteczko". There are two plurals, one is for plurals of words describing male people, and the other is for all other plurals. So this is obviously the second option. The right form for it is "smaczne".
It's not feminine. It's a plural of a neuter noun. I finally understood why so many people ask similar questions, it's probably because someone decided to teach the plural "ciasteczka" before singular "ciasteczko". Although the translation is visibly plural, "cookies", so frankly I'm still a bit surprised.
In Nominative, the neuter singular adjectives are identical to the nonvirile ('not masculine-personal plural') ones. "smaczne" is nonvirile here, not neuter.