"You know nothing about her."
Translation:Nic o niej nie wiecie.
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I guess this is a word order thing. I guessed "Nie wiesz nic o niej". Is this unnatural?
Yes, yours seems more of a neutral word order, Paranoix's seems to underline "don't know" more, and "Nic o niej nie wiecie" sounds like something a guy would say to his parents who disapprove of his new girlfriend.
Although frankly, thinking too much about 'what would which version stress' can make one easily arrive at overinterpretations, so don't stick to that too much ;)
Is there a simple explanation as to when to use 'nia' and when to use 'niej'. Usually I try the absorption method with the Polish, picking it up from the context, but for some reason it isn't working for me on this one.
If we ignore post-prepositional forms for a second, then the short answer will be:
Nią is the instrumental case
Niej is the locative case.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ona#Declension_2
Wiedzieć o always requires locative.
Thank you. Trying to get to grips with this and will probably take quite a few sentences to become familiar with the usage. Maybe because it's difficult to find English examples to learn the use of cases but I will work at finding links to associate with! Esp struggling with locative which I think in English is all about location( in, at, on, etc) but in other languages is also about the way in which something is done?
Locative is the only case which works exclusively with prepositions. I even came across a textbook once, where it was labelled "the prepositional case". So I would interpret it as an grammatical accessory to [o, na, po, w(e) and przy]. But note that depending on meaning and context the former four can also be used with the accusative case.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Polish/Prepositions_as_hints_to_declensions
[Nic] [o niej] [nie wiesz]. You can put these groups in a random order and you always get correct polish sentence :) Each one has different meanning, depending on context of course.
"Nic nie wiesz o niej" was marked as incorrect. Is this a bug in the DuoLingo program? Or is there something incorrect about this particular word order?
I really don't love it (the pronoun at the end of the sentence), but I guess it's acceptable. Added.
It probably would, if there weren't two mistakes in it. Unlike English, you also need to negate the verb, so there's a 'nie' missing, plus, 'wiedzieć o' requires the locative case, so it should be 'niej'.