"Small animals"

Translation: Małe zwierzęta

[PolskaNatasha]

why is this not mała zwieręta....I can never understand how these endings change!!!!!

[Jellei]

The word "zwierzęta" is plural (and 'not masculine-personal plural), so the right adjective form is "małe".

"mała" is feminine singular.

[Rafalopopolsku]

I was about to search why not mali ... I found why here.

Duolingo is funny to use, but there is such a lack of informations... We have to have a look herein the forums to try to understand (if by any chance we found a good guy giving good explanations), then go further on internet. Nice introduction, nice starter to a language... but how many times I have to stop and think : " hey, but why this and not his ? etc... " But maybe it's also the purpose of Duolingo, make us search further. In my opinion there should be some kind of pop up windows (on demand) to explain the general rules of the grammar.

[alik1989]

Exactly. And it's not that hard to open a declension table on wiktionary. That saves us a lot of time and effort.

As you can see there, "mali" is classified as "masculine personal", and zwierzę is neither masculine, nor a person.

[malcolm7777777]

Is this noun irregular?

[immery]

not at all. table for -ę ending neuter nouns

[RobertMact1]

There is a small group of Polish neuter nouns that end in -Ę, refer to animals and take -TA in the plural: zwierzę - zwierzęta (animal - animals); piskię - piskięta (baby bird, nestling - baby birds, nestlings); niemowię - niemowięta (baby - babies)

[JemappelleMaya]

Thank you. That was very clarifying.

[GrzegorzW1987]

Just one correction: there should be l instead of i before ę in all those endings (pisklę, pisklęta, niemowlę, niemowlęta).