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- Topic: Polish >
- "Ta kaczka je chleb."
13 Comments
Because it doesn't match the noun.
Polish determiners (this, that) have forms dependent on the gender (and also the case). So in Nominative you will for example have "ten chleb" (this bread, masculine) but "ta kaczka" (this duck, feminine).
593
Off topic, but I'd like to congratulate you and the team on the frequent use of Present Continuous. This is almost non-existent in the English from Polish course (and in all the Duo English courses that I've seen), resulting in a lot of somewhat unnatural constructions.
Easy to understand the rule, except the fact of duck being considered feminine. In my language (Portuguese - Brazil), we use masculine pronoun to reference to a duck.
Got it marek, can you please tell me howmany nouns are there, if you explain me like that it would be great help, dzienki!
How many nouns? Do you mean how many genders?
Well, in singular you have masculine, feminine and neuter. There is one case (Accusative), where it is also important whether a masculine noun is 'animate' or 'inanimate'.
In plural you have 'masculine personal' plural (almost only 'groups including at least one man') and 'not masculine-personal' plural (as the name says... basically anything else. dogs, boxes, women, houses, everything without men).
I hate it when words that are different genders in different languages. In French the duck in general is a male unless specified. Is there a word for male duck in Polish?
Yes, "kaczor". "Donald Duck" = "Kaczor Donald".
But we generally don't accept other words for animals than the 'default species name'. It may rather create confusion when suggested to the learner, than be helpful. And frankly I don't think you'd hear "kaczor" often outside of conversations about the citizens of Duckburg (Polish: "Kaczogród", if anyone's interested).
What would be translation of "This duck eats duck" rather than "This duck is eating duck"?
Are you really asking about 'eating duck' (je kaczkę) or did you mean 'bread' and focused on the difference between "eats" and "is eating"?
In general, "eats" and "is eating" can easily be translated the same way, into "je".
But there is also a so-called 'habitual' verb for "to eat", and that is "jadać", so here: "jada". This works only for Present Simple. It's not taught in this course, but you can encounter it, it's not something rare. But the plain "jeść" can easily be enough.
