"Czemu nigdy mi nie pomogliście?"
Translation:Why have you never helped me?
20 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
"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.
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.