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- "Pamiętajcie o piciu wody."
23 Comments
Apparently translating "pamiętać o" directly into "remember about" isn't correct English.
It sounds fine to my ear, but well, I am not a native speaker. All the natives I asked are strongly against.
I think your ear is right. The answer you give is a translation of ;Pamientacie pic wode' (accents p]omitted)
"Pamiętajcie" :)
Well, literally yes, but then everyone keeps telling me that it's either wrong, or it changes the meaning...
I would like to know, whether that is a natural-sounding sentence in Polish and whether 'Nie zapominacie pić wodę' is something more commonly used.
Well, you just wrote a statement, (you do not forget), imperative would be nie zapomnijcie/nie zapominajcie.
But to remind people to drink water all the time "Pamiętajcie o piciu wody." (In my opinion) is more natural
If it were a one time thing. (like after a training or sth),
"Nie zapomnijcie napić się wody"
sounds most natural to me.
For me "Pamiętajcie o piciu wody" or "Nie zapomnijcie o piciu wody" sound natural too.
Well, such a 'fancy' wording would be rendered by "spożywaniu" (spożywanie), I'd say.
Really? I would never use „spożywanie” with water(or any other fluid that isn't soup, for that matter) – nevertheless, "water intake" I would translate as „przyjmowanie wody”, so „Pamiętaj/Pamiętajcie o przyjmowaniu wody” or even more formal „Pamiętajcie o przyjmowaniu płynów”(but that's not literal, as „płyn” = 'fluid'). ;)
Hmm... that sure seems better indeed. At least for water. Anyway, the point is that it's too much for just 'o piciu' :)
"spożywanie wody" does have a few thousands results in Google, though...
Hehe, It happens that I sometimes find your options odd(but not wrong, just odd ;) ) – usually, when that happens, I comment of your post with the way in which I would say something, to give learners wider perspective of how natives use the language.
„Spożywać wodę” belongs to this category – while many people use it like that, for me „spożywać” connects semantically with eating, so it is just as odd as 'eating water'. ;)
That doesn't make it wrong though – as I'm sure you are aware, it's axiomatic that a native speaker can't really commit a mistake in his own language (because of how a language is defined :P), so since you said it, it's part of the language, but the learners now know that they might decide to employ a different verb with fluids and that was really the whole point. ;)
Well, recently you wrote something about "głowica prysznicowa", and I was like "WTF?!" about it, do you keep nuclear devices in your bathroom? :D Although now, when I googled it, it's clearly a different thing than "słuchawka" and I have no idea how I'd call that.
Well... I don't want to start a discussion, but I'm pretty sure that 'poszłem' or 'włanczać' are mistakes. So I'd never say that a native speaker can't make a mistake. One's idiolect is one thing, but the standard language has rules...
Well, "really" was meaningful in my comment ;) – of course you can make mistakes against the „norma poprawnościowa”, but since that is more of a social contract than linguistic category(mostly), those are more of the "savoir-vivre" transgressions than linguistic ones – but I guess we mostly agree here. ;)
Well, I in turn just googled „słuchawka prysznicowa” and realised we were talking about different things – since that sentence was about shower, I was thinking about „kabina prysznicowa” equipment, the shower-like thingy that's part of tap above bathtub I would call simply „tusz”(which I'm quite sure is a „germanizm” from Dusche, but can't be bothered to check the dictionaries) . ;)
When I last asked our native (British) experts, they were strongly against, saying that it looks like a calque from Polish...
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It is less idiomatic than the main answer and I would tend to interpret it as having a slightly different meaning - not admonishing the addressee to drink water, but reminding him or her of some other related issue, for instance, a warning that the water in that place is not potable.
We wondered about it some more and it seems like that interpretation's just too different from the intention of the Polish sentence.
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So, is it normal in Polish that when you tell someone to remember to do something, it's always what a literal translation to English would be "remember about the [gerund]"?
So, in this case "remember to drink water" is said "pamiętaj o piciu wody" (remember about the drinking of water). Would "remember to bring beer" follow the same pattern, i.e., "pamiętaj o przeniesieniu piwa"?
What about "remember to buy bread after work" -- will that be "pamiętaj o kupowanie chleba po pracy"? I thought I remembered seeing an "aby" + infinitive construction somewhere else, so "remember about drinking" for "remember to drink" was unexpected.
Is there a rule for using one construction versus the other?
I believe that those two constructions are interchangeable. It's either "pamiętać o + gerund in Locative" or "pamiętać, [żeby/aby/by] + infinitive". "żeby/aby/by" mean the same, but I believe that this is the right order from the most common to less common. All of them are common enough to feel natural.
So in your sentences you have some slight mistakes:
"pamiętaj o przyniesieniu piwa" will be "remember about bringing beer", this one letter of difference in your answer changed the meaning to something like "moving the beer", changing its location.
"pamiętaj o kupowaniu chleba po pracy" (Gerund in Genitive), but the question is whether you consciously used imperfective, because you're saying that I should regularly buy bread after work, not that I should buy it today after work (o kupieniu).
Yous is the sentence I would use but since this s an exercise on verbal nouns I used remember about drinking water and got marked wrong
