"April is a month in the spring."

Translation: Kwiecień to miesiąc wiosny.

[JestemJenny]

Does the meaning change slightly in these sentences? I don't have the proper accents available sorry!

Kwiecien jest miesiacem wiosny

vs

Kwiecien to miesiac wiosny

(April is a month in spring)

vs.

(April is a month of spring)??

I feel like I'm not fully understanding the reasoning between the use of miesiacem vs miesiac... but I think it has to do with the use of "jest" or "to".

[Gerardd88]

These are two equivalent ways of expressing it. You can say either to + nominative, or jest + instrumental, e.g.:
Tamta kobieta to moja mama = Tamta kobieta jest moją mamą. (That woman is my mom)
Poniedziałek to dzień tygodnia = Poniedziałek jest dniem tygodnia (Monday is the day of the week)

[PatWheelho]

Is one of these 2 ways of saying the same thing used more in everyday Polish? I feel like as a learner, I am more inclined to use the nominative one

[CJ101-TG]

It's the same.

[Keef69402]

The new app version doesnt allow to swap green answer popups up and down to go back to one's answer and see what was wrong with it, a bit silly, isn't it?

[Sandra564401]

Wiosny is genitive. I was following Gerard88's explanation and thought I should use instrumental . . . wiosną . So now I'm wondering when to use genitive and when to use instrumental, especially in regard to sentences with "jest" rather than "to".

[Jellei]

You'd use "wiosną" if the sentence was "April is spring". But it would be quite a weird sentence and it's not what we have here.

We should treat "a month in the spring" as one noun phrase. Inside this noun phrase, "spring" will always be Genitive, which luckily is easy to see by the English 'of'. That part won't change. If we were to show the declension of the whole noun phrase "miesiąc wiosny", that would be: Nominative "miesiąc wiosny", Genitive "miesiąca wiosny", Dative "miesiącowi wiosny", Accusative "miesiąc wiosny", Instrumental "miesiącem wiosny", Locative "miesiącu wiosny", Vocative "miesiącu wiosny".

Here we can choose between Nominative "Kwiecień to miesiąc wiosny" and Instrumental "Kwiecień jest miesiącem wiosny".

[Thierry835984]

Sometimes you have to use "to" and other times not. When?

[Jellei]

https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/16373167 = I think this should solve all the doubts.

[lemazhikhin]

That's exactly the case where a Russian studying Polish language would barely face any difficulties. In Russian the same thing can be spoken by two similar ways: (1) Апрель - месяц весны (именительный падеж); (2) Апрель является месяцем весны (творительный падеж).

[luisdavid2008]

Spanish speakers suffer believe me . Thanks for clarifying our doubts