"Czemu nigdy mi nie pomogliście?"
Translation:Why have you never helped me?
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Is this pluperfect? If not, "Why did you never help me?"/"Why have you never helped me?" would be more likely English....
Also, what's the diff. between "Dlaczego" and "Czemu" (if any)? Thanks....
"Dlaczego" and "Czemu" mean exactly the same thing. Some people may find "czemu" slightly colloquial and a bit 'worse', because it may be considered a Russicism.
This is normal past tense, pluperfect is pretty dead nowadays (apart from "powinien był", the past of "should"). Both of your versions work, but I agree the 'had' part looks kinda strange, so I'll go with "have" as the default one.
As it happens, "mi nigdy nie" is accepted, although not "nigdy nie mi".... The "nie" has to go before the part of the sentence being negated, which, here, is the verb "pomogliście".
How would the meaning of this sentence change if "pomagaliście" was used instead?
"nigdy" - "never" does the job ("ever" if negated):
Czemu mi nigdy nie pomogliście/pomagaliście? -
Why haven't you ever helped me?
I wonder if the "nigdy" makes the use of impf. untenable. Otherwise, it could be something like "why didn't you ever used to help me" or some such spaghetti :-).
This is present tense, as opposed to the past tense in the Polish sentence.
I'd read "nie pomogliście" either as "with some specific thing that I hoped to get help with" or "not even once, not at all".
"nie pomagaliście" sounds to me like I hoped for help on several occasions, but it never happened.
870
So if I was looking for a specific act of helping, which could have been done at any of a number of past times (but was never done)--perfective. If I was looking for repeated acts of helping (none of which were done)--imperfective (?). This distinction would normally be ignored in English.
Well, yes, I'd say so.
But please keep in mind that the perfective/imperfective distinction is something that comes to a native speaker intuitively. Comments like mine above are attempts at explaining something that we normally don't have to think about, and it's not easy to come up with an explanation 'OK, so why is it the way it is' sometimes. Therefore there is a certain degree of subjectivity in such explanations.
We submitted an audio change, but that's a new feature, let's hope it works. The changed audio that I could listen to is not exactly great, but the stress is surely better.