"This woman's husband does not speak English."
Translation:Mąż tej kobiety nie mówi po angielsku.
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mąż - subject
ta kobieta - 'owner' of said husband - to express possession you use Genitive
so Gen: ta kobieta -> tej kobiety. The word order is fixed, 'tej kobiety mąż, mąż kobiety tej' etc are not natural, unless in some very narrow context.
So we have (subject) + (atribute, description) => Mąż tej kobiety.
I mean, my Polish grammar teachers have always mentioned that putting the word at the beginning or end of the sentence gives it emphasis, so I guess it just depends on what you want to emphasize. So yea to some poeple i guess emphasizing the woman sounds odd. Duolingo has a very specific way of speaking Polish (which is why it says I'm 1% fluent in it, though I've been speaking it since I could actually produce words instead of just sounds) so if you don't learn the language the way they want you to, you're learning it wrong, ya know? For example, they say koszula means shirt. I've literally only ever heard my dad call his dress shirts koszule everything else is just a bluzka. Maybe it's also because my Polish is sort of americanized at this point, but it's still unnecessarily picky about things like "maz tej kobiety"
Where do you have fluency in Polish counted?
As to possesion- "normal" word order is noun+noun in genitive - mąż kobiety, książka Kasi- but Polish has almost free word order- so changing this is grammatically correct, but calls much mote attention to the phrase.
Bluzka- this is clearly Polish-American thing. No man in Poland will be caught wearing "bluzka" (Well not really there are cross-dressers etc.)
as to being unnecessarily picky- there are three possible circumstances - 1)options the course creators didn't think about 2) options that are clearly incorrect in Polish even though some Polish people speak this way 3) options that are technically correct but very rare in Polish, but that are literal translation of English.
on my screen it has fluency in the top right corner. And yea, my Polish is just a bit americanized at this point. but yea, I get that. If I want to advance in Polish on here, I have to do it by learning Polish the way Duolingo teaches it. Also, I didn't even know bluzka translated to blouse until this course xD
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That would be useful... I keep clarifying that I am learning to read & write the language, along with some ability to understand it when heard, but that I'm not learning to speak it... My pronunciation attempts seriously suck eggs & I know it!
I've come to understand that you put the subject at the beginning to emphasize it. Not sure if it's correct, since Duolingo is the only resource I have and you kinda just have to learn from trial and error here :/
If this is true , then how is one supposed to be able to tell what to emphasize? In my answer, I put tej at the beginning and it was counted wrong. Is there something I'm missing??
- Thoroughly Confused/Trying Very Hard
You put the subject at the begining - at first its hard to understand if you dont have another language that also does this but i think over time your brain gets used to the pattern. So anyways, Mąż is first because that's what you're talking about. In polish you dont say "this womans husband" you say "husband this woman's" its easier in the begining to think of a comma being there in english so to translate it like"husband, this woman's, ..." Yk or at least that's what i did and it helped but my polish is still basic af :)
"Tego mąż tej kobiety" makes no sense grammatically, and "To mąż tej kobiety" can only make sense if "to" is a dummy pronoun and it means "This is this woman's husband".
I guess you probably meant "Ten mąż tej kobiety". This is grammatically correct but very, very weird, meaning exactly the same as "this husband of this woman".
In the English sentence, "this" refers to "woman", not "husband".
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"nie rozmawia", if anything, could be "does not talk", but "rozmawiać" is about having a conversation, so the meaning of "nie rozmawia po angielsku" is closer to "cannot have a conversation in English" (which I guess may mean that he knows some English, just doesn't feel comfortable talking in it?)
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"Tej kobiety mąż" is clearly a calque of the English word order, we just don't speak this way. The 'possessed object' goes first, followed by the 'possessor'. "Mąż tej kobiety".