"Duzi chłopcy kochają małe zwierzęta."
Translation:Big boys love small animals.
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At the beginning of the sentence - why does duzi end in an 'i' and not an 'e'. I thought the neutral form of the adjective is used with plural nouns as 'małe zwierzęta'.
Yes. In plural, there's the masculine option which works for male human groups and mixed human groups, and the feminine option which looks like singular neuter and works for everything else.
Why doesn't dużi end in '-y' since boys are a male plural/group and chłopcy ends in '-y'?
The nominative ending that is added to virile adjectives is always -i, however, there are three stem endings that interact with -i and become something else:
- r + i -> rzy (dobrzy)
- k + i -> cy (lekcy)
- d + i -> dzy (dłudzy)
And duzi is no exception here. Note that a /żi/ combination does not exist, because /i/ is a softening (palatalising) vowel, which only allows soft consonants before it. The penultimate letter hence sounds like a /ź/, but the diacritic is omitted (implied) due to a spelling convention.
I'm afraid that virile nouns are a little bit more complicated than that, but here is a good overview of the rules:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Polish/Nominative_case#Declension_for_nouns_2
