- Forum >
- Topic: Polish >
- "Zaraz będziemy robić obiad."
15 Comments
335
When I grew up as a native (British) English speaker, 'I' and 'we' were followed by 'shall' to express the future. The use of 'will' in the first person implied a deliberate intention. My instinct is to say 'I shall do' and 'we shall do', and I don't accept these as errors! American English doesn't make use of many of the verbal intricacies of British usage, including the range of tenses (cf 'Have you already eaten?' / 'Did you eat already?'
"we will cook dinner soon" isn't accepted (reported). Funny thing is that I remember some previous sentence from the previous topics, where 'cook' was the only accepted answers for robić in this context =)
"To cook" literally means "gotować", and "robić" means "to make" or "to do". However you can't <'do' a dinner>, so: - "Gotować obiad" = 'to cook a dinner' - "Robić obiad" = 'to make a dinner'
you're right of course, but my point was that such, hmm, "synonyms" should be accepted for the sake of ease, because most often people have something substantial for 'obiad', which implies cooking, as opposed to mere making.
Thread clarifying the cook vs make usage a little bit - https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090811015844AAJXFtU
- 594
In general, I think the team are right to translate Future Imperfective with Future Continuous, and it's also what Routledge do in Colloquial Polish, for example. "We will cook dinner soon" sounds more definitive to me, and a more suitable candidate for Perfective, I would have thought.
We wanted to be stricter, then we got softer and now it's hard to keep it consistent... okay, 'cook' and its forms are accepted now.
But I'd be really surprised if there really was a sentence that accepts "cook" for "robić" but does not accept "make"...
- 227
dinner should be accepted for obiad (as both are the main meal of the day, lunch is not the main meal of the day or a good translation of obiad imho)
- 594
Whoever gave you a minus doesn't know what they're talking about (which in my experience is sadly usually the case with downmarkers) - see dictionary link. So I'm marking you back up.
Everyone agrees that "dinner" is the main meal of the day. In America, I believe, that is mainly in the evening, but in Britain, many people call their midday meal "dinner".
You're absolutely right; of course it should be accepted, and as I understand, now is.
Does this tense imply that they probably will not cook - in comparison to the future perfect tense?
This works like Present Continuous in the future meaning - and it just focuses on the process. Sure, nothing about 'finishing cooking succesfully' is mentioned, but it would definitely be too much to say that it implies not finishing. It just says that in a moment, we will be in the middle of cooking.
"teraz" simply means "(right) now", "at this moment".
"zaraz" doesn't seem to have a natural equivalent in English, it means something like "in a minute", "in a moment", it means that something is about to happen very soon ('soon' is subjective, I guess). If my mom shouts to me that lunch is ready, I shout back "Zaraz!" which means that I'll be downstairs in a moment (and then I spend three more minutes in front of Duolingo).
