"Nie znam ich."
Translation:I do not know them.
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In this sentence, where the case is genitive, yes. In a sentence where the case is accusative, ich applies only to oni, and je applies to one, I believe.
(note: not a native speaker)
It is not glottal, it is velar. Both "h" and "ch" make that sound: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Voiceless_velar_fricative.ogg
It is worth noting that there once was a distinction between the sounds of "h" and "ch" (some reading, unfortunately in Polish).
Polish and Russian are very similar phonetically...
...Polish words might actually be easier to spell w/the Cyrillic alphabet!!!
I don't think Polish would be easier to spell in Cyrillic. Cyrillic is very inconvenient for vowels. In languages written in Cyrillic for the same sounds use different letters. Cyrillic is convenient just to spell hissing and soft sounds.
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From above posts 'wiedzieć' sounds like to be aware of and 'znać' is to be familiar with.
I use Memrise as well, and learned that "wiem" meant "know." Is that wrong, or can "wiem" and "znam," both be used?
Polish has two types of "know" and they are not interchangeable at all. I came up with the following explanation:
znać = to know X
wiedzieć = to know, that X; to know about X, etc.
For example: "Nie znam ich" (I do not know them), "Nic o nich nie wiem" (I do not know anything about them.
"Znam jego kota" (I know his cat), "Wiem, że jego kot jest gruby (I know, that his cat is fat)
"Znam odpowiedź" (I know the answer), "Wiem, jaka jest odpowiedź (I know what the answer is).
I think in a way you could understand "znać" as "to be familiar with".
to know how to do something and therefore to be able to do it.
"Czy umiesz pływać?" (Can you swim?), "Nie umiem gotować" (I cannot cook), etc.
OK, so we have two plurals: "oni" (at least one man among them) and "one" (no men among them).
In the Accusative case (e.g. "I know them") their forms are, respectively, "ich" and "je" ("Znam [ich/je]").
But here we have Genitive, and Genitive of both those words is "ich". "je" would be grammatically wrong.
Why is the pronoun at the end ? There are some other exercises where we have an error if we do that but right here, its fine. When is it accepted or not?
There's simply no other place for it. It definitely can't be at the beginning, and you need to place "nie" in front of what you negate, so "Nie znamy ich" is the only option.
You could put the subject pronoun explicitly at the beginning (which is completely redundant, unless you want to stress it, mostly for contrast), and then that's "My ich nie znamy", because suddenly you have a place to hide the object pronoun.
But "Nie znamy ich" is the most natural way of phrasing this.