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- Topic: Polish >
- "One nigdy nie gotują."
10 Comments
Huh, so even though Nigdy is negative, you still have to say "nie" as well? "One nigdy gotują" wouldn't work?
No. with words like nigdy=never , żaden=none, nic=nothing , nikt=nobody etc you need to use "nie"
It's just one the peculiarities of the Polish language that you gotta use a double negation. If you use it the way you suggested, it is clearly a mistake and would be noticed right away by a native speaker.
In my language we would usually put the sentence like this: one nie nigdy gotują. Does this order works in Polish as well?
No. That would be like saying "not never" in English. What you negate is cooking, so 'nie' has to come in front of it.
How would you say "they never do anything"? Google translate suggests "oni nigdy nic nie robią", but "they never do nothing" translates to the same thing, which is opposite in meaning. Should I be saying "they never do something" instead? i.e. "oni nigdy czegoś nie robią" Thanks!
I'd go with "Oni nigdy nic nie robią" because it avoids putting the pronoun "nic" at the end of the sentence. But "Oni nigdy nie robią nic" could also work if you wanted to emphasize the 'nothing, absolutely nothing' part.
"Oni nigdy czegoś nie robią" is fine grammatically, but very strange semantically (just like in English, I believe) - "So there's one thing that they never do, but what was that, I cannot remember... anyway, they never do something".
