"Moja siostra ma wiele koleżanek."
Translation:My sister has many friends.
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koleżanek = genitive plural of "koleżanka"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kole%C5%BCanka#Polish
so "wiele" takes the genitive plural.....
Why is it wielu kolegów ('u' ending), but then wiele koleżanek ('e' ending)??? I don't understand why wiele is changing endings.
Well, it has two versions, depending on which plural you're using. "wielu" is masculine personal, "wiele" is 'not masculine-personal'.
(This comment used to have another part which was completely wrong.)
Jellei, Can Duolingo maybe set up a supplementary tree just for Polish numerals? Having all these rules bunched up into one part of the tree feels too challenging for those trying to learn this language step by step. Or at least, can't there be a few separate Number branches to the tree? Thanks for your help!
Tree 2.0 plans at least 5 skills for Numbers ;) For example "Numbers 1" only uses Nominative and Accusative and nothing else, despite that the users know also Genitive and Instrumental at this point. We are aware that this is one of the most difficult things in this whole language.
We call every iteration of a course a "tree". So the course you're taking is technically "Tree 1" in the Incubator (our database). The new, redesigned course that was started is called "Tree 2" in the database, although we call it "Tree 2.0" because it sounds cooler :D
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So if "wiele" takes Nominative, is koleżanek an irregular Nominative non-masculine personal plural of koleżanka? I thought it would be koleżanki in Nominative. Koleżanek looks like Genitive to me.
It is Genitive. I don't know where my brain was when I wrote that comment, that was complete nonsense... Both "wielu" and "wiele" take Genitive. Apologies for confusing you.
(the comment has been edited now)
Yes :)
wielu kolegów, przyjaciół, znajomych (form of 'znajomi')
wiele koleżanek, przyjaciółek, znajomych (form of 'znajome')
If it was wieli, it would be at least consistent with the general rule of masculine plural. But anyway, it is what it is.
Are there any other examples where masculine plural ends with -u?
There is no "general rule of masculine plural", you need to look at each part of speech individually.
-u is a common ending for masculine personal (virile) numerals: pięciu, sześciu, siedmiu, ośmiu, dziewięciu, dziesięciu, jedenastu, dwunastu...
Actually it's not, I agree with ankbhatnagar: this numeral/pronoun has a 'masculine personal' form ("wielu") and a 'not masculine-personal' form which is the basic one: "wiele". Your link shows "wielu" to be the Accusative form of... "wielu".
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The first place I had checked was WSJP. Same thing there, as far as I understand.
But yes, I was wrong about it not being masculine. Non-masculine Accuastive is wiele, as you say.
EDIT: and I was wrong about it not being plural as well, as alik said. Shame on me.
The declension table has two columns: 'mo' - which is short for męskoosobowy (virile) and '-mo' - which is short for niemęskoosobowy (nonvirile).
Those two categories only exist in plural, so at least according to WSJP, all the forms of wiele are plural.
Most natives seem to think that "wiele" is used with countable nouns and "dużo" with uncountable ones. This is actually not true, but because of that reason mixing them can sound unnatural to a native ear. I think it's a lot more natural to use "dużo" with a countable one than "wiele" with an uncountable one.
Also, "dużo" is only possible to be used in Nominative, Accusative and (only when it's the verb that needs it) Genitive. So for example if you need to use it in Instrumental, you need to switch to a form of "wiele".
koleżanek is feminine - actually girlfriends isn't it? - but I was marked wrong?
In Polish "girlfriend" means somebody's partner, this is a sign of deeper relationship.
Girlfriend would be probably closer than a 'koleżanka', which is just a bit more than a 'znajoma'. A girlfriend might be a 'przyjaciółka', where a girlfriend in a sense of a partner is a 'dziewczyna'.
Yeah, but in this course we always treat "girlfriend" as a romantic partner, it would rather only mess things up if we were to deal with "girlfriend" as something that teenagers say about their friends.
Just an aside, I think it's usually women over 40 that use "girlfriend" to mean their female friend.
So, because koleżanek here is genitive, does that mean a direct translation is something like "many of friends?" Where else does Polish have such a construction, where a quantitative adjective takes a genitive following it?
I wouldn't call 'wiele' an adjective... although I see that English Wiktionary does :| To me, it's a kind of a numeral, or more of an adverb. Anyway, it's a quantifier, and quantifiers just take Genitive.
It is not exact tranlation. It should be " My sister has many colleagues." My sister has many friends - it means: " Moja siostra ma wielu przyjaciół."
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Same as with another phrase in this lesson, "coworkers" should be an acceptable translation for "koleżanek".
"My sister has a lot of coworkers" not accepted, 16-feb-2020.
I don't know if it's really a good translation. Especially that this sentence has "koleżanek" and not "kolegów", so it mentions only her female friends. We'd rather translate "co-workers" as "koledzy/koleżanki z pracy", with "work" mentioned explicitly.
I did make a similar comment about colleagues implying co-workers in English but deleted it when I found a comment in another thread that said in Polish the meaning is wider - classmates, football team etc. (So I'll repeat that here to help anyone like me.)
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It is in the notes for the "People" lesson: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/pl/People/tips-and-notes