"Oni sprzedają dom Marcie."
Translation:They are selling the house to Marta.
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I don't know English too good so maybe other preposition works but Oni sprzedają dom Marcie.
Oni -they (nominative)
sprzedają- sell (present tense , plural 3rd person)
sprzedawać kogo? co? (Akk) - I sell who/what
sprzedawać komu ? czemu? (Dativ)- I sell whom? (who buys)
Dative Indicates the indirect object. To whom something is given, or action for somebody
Accusative Indicates the direct object of the sentence
(those last descriptions from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Polish/Noun_cases , a place where I check the names of cases every single time )
I think it's confusing because this is the first time(?) in the course you see the dative case and it's not introduced in a lesson at all.
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I believe you are correct. I am seeing this dative for the first time in a "strengthen skils" exercise. Dative should probably have a lesson of its own, I would think. I guessed genitive, which was really dumb, since I just had Nie znamy Marty…
The way I did to learn it was: the dative case kind of contains the "to" in itself. When you use the dative case, you know that's the person in the sentence getting the thing "given" (or, in this case, sold). So, in this case, when you use Marcie (which is the dative case for Marta), you know Marta is receiving the thing being sold.
I don't know if I made myself clear, but it total makes sense in my head :)
You presume that if I look at the noun I already know: It's nominative form. 2: What the dative ending would look like if I did know the nominative form.
"They are selling Martha the house" and "They are selling the house to Martha" both convey that Martha is the indirect object. However, the excercise currently only accepts the second form.
"Oni sprzedają dom Marty." House is in accusative case, Martha is in genitive case to show possession.
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that was just my question, I'm still lost with the different cases. Doesn't anyone know a trick to make the difference, or is it just time and practising that will help?
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Where am i going wrong with "they are selling their house to marta"? Is it only family that has the presumption of ownership?
For example
Ona jest mama = she is my mum
Actually I don't see anything at all in "Ona jest mamą" that would suggest she's my mom. There isn't anything about 'me' in the sentence. Compare with "Rozmawiam z mamą" (I am talking with [my/] mom) - here 'I' am present in the sentence, so it's most probable that I'm talking with my own mom. Generally this 'presumption of ownership' states that the object is probably 'owned' by the subject of the sentence, and your sentence has "She" as the subject.
As for "their house", that actually makes a lot of sense. Added.
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Damn thought I'd put a good example, at least I try haha. Thanks I will make sure I remember that you must be involved in the statement for it to have that effect.
Thanks for the speedy response :-)
Could you include this in one of the explanations! It's a bit hard to work out unless you read why.
It seems that this sentence may be too early, "Marcie" is a Dative form and apparently Dative hasn't been introduced yet :/ I don't know what to do, whether I should remove it altogether or let people find it out from the comments... some things in this course are a bit messy :|
Indeed, the dative case has only received a passing mention so far, and no forms were introduced, so in the middle of all these exercises of modifying names in the genitive it seems not only out of place but a bit of a sloppy intro. Duo does this sometimes, though it doesn't look like it was by clever design but rather by accident, so it might have a better place in a section devoted to the dative case.
Maybe. It has been 3 years since I did Polish as an English learner and since have done English from the Polish learner’s side. It makes sense to me now. I remember talk about a revised course for Polish, is that still happening?