- Forum >
- Topic: Polish >
- "Widzę tę kobietę."
14 Comments
Why Widzę tę kobietę and not widzę tą kobietę? Does 'ta' take that form after a verb because it is a determiner and not an adjective?
ten/ta/to is not an adjective. It's a noun determiner when followed by a noun. In your case, tą is in the instrumental case. Kobietę is in the accusative case, so its noun determiner tę and must match its noun.
No. LOL
Seeing = dating, that's an English equation. In Polish, seeing is just with your eyes.
Why is "I am seeing this woman" not accepted? I find it very irritating that in some cases this course requires to translate the present tense of imperfective verbs as "to be +ing" and in other, seemingly random, cases this is marked as an error.
471
- This course's material is used 'in reverse' too, by Polish speakers learning English, so Duo prefers good Polish and good English in its answers.
- Non-native English speakers often confuse Simple Present and Present Continuous, despite learning rules on which to use when. However, English is more about (seemingly random) exceptions than about rigid rules.
- Polish verbs are (to me) horribly complex in so many ways, e.g. nosić vs. mieć na sobie, but to see / to be seeing is a rare English example whose Simple Present and Present Continuous have very different meanings:
• to see: to see (by eye); to understand
• to be seeing: to be going out with (UK); to be dating (US).
If I find other examples, I'll edit them into this post.
- As va-diim gently hints, the Polish widzieć just means to see (by eye).
[19 Jan 2020 10:10 UTC]
- 471
As I explained here (3rd. point), to see / to be seeing is a rare example of an English verb whose Simple Present and Present Continuous have very different meanings:
• to see: to see (by eye); to understand
• to be seeing: to be going out with (UK); to be dating (US).
So the English "I am seeing this woman" means "I am dating this woman" – which is not at all the same as "Widzę tę kobietę" = "I see this woman" ;-)
[21 May 2020 13:58 UTC]
- 185
So I had this as a "write what you hear" exercise and to my untrained ears it was tough to know if this was "widzę tę kobietę" or "widzę te kobiety". Do these sound very similar to a Polish ear too?
