"My sister has many friends."
Translation:Moja siostra ma wiele koleżanek.
22 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
You need "wielu" to modify masculine personal nouns in the accusative (and nominative). It is also the genitive, dative, and locative form for both personal AND impersonal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiele#Polish
We recently resigned from putting "colleague" as the main translation, because it narrows the meaning too much and in a way it can be even considered a false friend.
The problem is that "friend" is very vague from the Polish point of view. It doesn't say much about how close the friendship is. So "koleżanka" is someone whom you (probably) like, but is not among your closest friends (przyjaciele). But it can also be just a colleague from work. Or a schoolmate, or a classmate. Frankly, it's also a rather vague word.
If a group of friends contained both males and females would you consider them simply as kolegi or would you have to say both kolegi i kolezanki (in the required cases)?
If i negate the sentence does wiele change to some kind of genitive or is it unchangeable? Thxs
"moja siostra ma wiele przyjaciół" should be acceptable, right? I was marked wrong.
Oh, that's actually a nice surprise that although you only had one letter wrong you still were failed, because this is in fact a mistake.
"wiele" is used with the 'not masculine-personal plural' nouns, so for example "many female friends" is "wiele przyjaciółek".
But for 'masculine-personal plural' nouns ("przyjaciele" imply there's at least one man among them), the right form is "wielu". "Moja siostra ma wielu przyjaciół".
I think that another question in this lesson has the sentence "My sister has a lot of colleagues" and it accepts "wielu", whereas here I wrote wielu and it was rejected. Please could you fix this? Thanks!
There is nothing to fix here. Both
Moja siostra ma wiele [przyjaciółek/koleżanek]
&
Moja siostra ma wielu [przyjaciół/kolegów]
are accepted answers.
Oh right it must have been some kind of error then for my answer to be rejected, thats fine :)
Przyjaciółek i koleżanek, do both of them refer to exclusively female friends?
Przyjaciele i koleżanki refer to male/mixed friends?
"Przyjaciółek i koleżanek" - yes, they are exclusively female friends. These are Genitive forms though, of "przyjaciółki" and "koleżanki".
"przyjaciele" - yes. But the other word is "koledzy". That would be male/mixed friends. In this sentence, it would be "wielu przyjaciół/kolegów".
Yes, I'm afraid, the grammar doesn't work.
"mieć" takes the Accusative form, and Accusative for such a phrase is identical to Nominative. However, the way such a phrase is constructed is that any quantifier needs the Genitive case ("przyjaciół"), and also as "przyjaciele/przyjaciół" is a virile (masculine personal plural) noun - that means that it's "friends" in general, and not "female friends" exclusively - the quantifier needs its virile form "wielu".
Yeah, I know it's complicated...