"A boy is looking for his dog."
Translation:Chłopiec szuka swojego psa.
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After putting 'Chłopiec szuka jego psa' here and it's correct, I'm wondering what is the difference of swoje, swoich, swojego, etc with jego, jej, ich, nasz, etc?
when chłopiec szuka jego psa , he is looking for somebody's dog. when chłopiec szuka swojego psa he is looking for his own dog.
English sentence can mean both "Chłopiec szuka jego psa" and Chłopiec szuka swojego psa". More explanations here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/12407494
'swego' is an example of the... kinda poetic possessive pronouns? They are rather found in songs, poetry and literature than in the everyday language. We only accept them when someone asks for it in a specific sentence. As generally, I think that I could count all the reports of them that I've seen on my fingers :)
If you are interested, you can check the other poetic forms here: https://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aneks:J%C4%99zyk_polski_-_zaimki#m.C3.B3j.2C_tw.C3.B3j.2C_sw.C3.B3j
They are the ones after the slash. They are built in quite a predictable way.
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Jellei I don't know if this is where I ask this but I don't know where else. Is 1929 the maximum number of words i the Polish course? I am asking this because yesterday I finished level 5 on every topic yet have never reached the 2000 word threshold. I'm just wondering if I missed anything.
Hey, I'm afraid that 1929 is all that is here. The course, like many other courses, is a lot older than this achievement. Many courses don't reach the treshold for the achievement :(
But fear not, we are already working on a new version of the course which will fix some problems and also add enough words to reach the achievement :)
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Thank you, Jellei. I appreciate the prompt reply. I do intend to keep doing review exercises until I totally nail down the cases. That, and spelling (not to mention some sounds I can't differentiate), are my major difficulties.
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I am sorry but I struggle with grammar. If the sentence was ..the woman is eating her dog..would it be "swojego psa"? Because I think..." the woman is eating her meal " would be ..swoj posiłek (?). But I'm not sure why. Apologies.
Pies is masculine animate, posiłek is masculine inanimate. The masculine inanimate accusative looks just like nominative, but the masculine animate accusative looks just like the genitive. This applies to both the noun and modifiers like swój.
But note that verbs like szukać require genitive instead of accusative.