"Dlaczego kupujesz cebulę?"

Translation: Why are you buying an onion?

[AtissEmiu]

To have a reason to cry...

[Zkamin]

I just did an audio to text exercise for this and I thought cebule as onionS. Then I remembered the common practice of not nasalizing the ę. I guess Polish people can't tell in this situation if they're buying one onion or more onions UNLESS they put an adjective before it to distinguish plural or singular here

[immery]

This is kind of exercise you need to report for audio. Thank you.

[Jellei]

Or unless they nasalize it more. But you're right, disabled the audio exercises.

[Magda556656]

No if you want to buy one onion you say cebulę with nasalizing ę

[Magda556656]

And when you want to say onions you say cebule

[Kendra800150]

Can the singular cebulę here be used in a collective sense to mean onions?

[Jellei]

Yes, I would understand it as a collective noun here.

[F4yY9kZj]

I.e., as a mass noun.

[F4yY9kZj]

But can it also be a count noun? 'Dlaczego kupujesz dwie cebuli'?

[Jellei]

Yeah, it's rather the other way round, it's a countable noun that happens to be used as an uncountable one as well.

It's "dwie cebule", though.

[F4yY9kZj]

'Dwie cebule'! So why did I write 'dwie cebuli'? I was thinking of Russian: the Russians use the genitive singular with 2/3/4, while the Poles use nominative/accusative plural. An amazing divergence!