"Myślę o nim."
Translation:I am thinking about him.
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I try listening very carefully for the ę at the end of words (like myslę) and can't ever hear it. Does it get cut off in common speech?
If you are up for challenge, here is Polish radio audition about this:
In common speech it is often not pronunced or is pronunced weakly if ę is the last letter of a word. But it depends. I hear older people use more complete ę sound, in dziękuję, for example. They might go all the way with that.
Also, if it is in the middle of a word, it gets pronunced either as the usual way or "en/em" depending on what the next letter will be. Same goes for ą. ("ow" / "on/om").
In Russian I would ask: Зачем усложнять себе жизнь? :)
Most ę-sounds are denasalised because they are easier to pronounce this way. And I have no clue why anyone would pronounce rz as ř, it's the last sound Czech children learn to utter correctly, because it's the most difficult one.
Fixed, it seems. The new male-voiced recordings do seem to sound the "ę".
What case is "him"? O nim I think is locative, but then there is z nim, which I thought would be instrumental?
Well, according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/o#Polish , "o" indeed takes locative when the meaning is "about, concerning", although it can take accusative at other times.
From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/z#Polish, "z" takes instrumental when it means "with".
Finally, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on#Polish shows that "nim" is both locative and instrumental.
HTH.
Those forms used to look different in Old Polish, but at some point they merged into one. Slavic languages feature a lot a morphological syncretisms (inflections which look the same, but have different functions depending on context).
czasownik "think" wyraża czynność umysłową i nie możno go używać w czasie Present Cont, dla tego: I think about him
Ten czasownik ma kilka znaczeń. Nie można go używać w aspekcie continuous, gdy on służy wyrażeniu czyjejś opinii. (I think that...).
Jeśli jednak chodzi o zastanawianie się nad czymś (właśnie o czynność umysłową), to takich ograniczeń w użyciu nie ma.
I thought in locative "nim" was also "it" so why can't this be "I am thinking about it?"
That is true, it can be about some masculine or neuter "it". Added now.