"Musiałam coś zrobić."
Translation:I had to do something.
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Not really. That would be "Miałam/miałem coś do zrobienia" which changes the emphasis. For example:
- Why didn't you call me yesterday? (Dlaczego wczoraj do mnie nie zadzwoniłaś/-łeś?)
- Sorry, I had something to do. (Przepraszam, miałam/-łem coś do zrobienia.)
is different from:
- Couldn't you do this later? (Nie mogłeś/-łaś tego zrobić później?)
- No, I really had to do it now. (Nie, naprawdę musiałam/-łem to zrobić teraz.)
In the first case, the emphasis is that there was something you had to do and in the second case, the emphasis is on the fact that you really HAD to do it.
How would you say 'I must have done something'? Eg in sentence "I must have done something wrong because I damaged it'.
Why was I wrong when I typed "I had something to do." I can only see a difference in meaning in a very few contexts.
If "I had something to do." is wrong as my answer was classified, where can we learn a rule that to write "something to do" from Polish to English the order of the words must be replaced?
Well, it's hard to find a place to teach how to say everything...
In "I had to do something", the reason the Polish sentence has a different word order is mostly 'to avoid putting a pronoun (coś) at the end of the sentence'. If you had "I had to make a sandwich' ('make' and 'do' are the same verb in Polish), that would be "Musiałem zrobić kanapkę".
With "something to do", the Polish translation uses the same order of words, but 'to do' changes into the gerund (verbal noun), something similar to "I had something that needed doing": "Miałem coś do zrobienia".
Note the change of the verb, because 'to have to' and simple 'to have' don't really have that much in common, at least from the point of view of Polish.
I don't think that's correct, at least not in this context.
If you're trying to replace "doing something" with "making something", then that won't work in English in general - they're not interchangeable like this.
However, if you're saying "I had to make something" because you're creative and you constantly want to create something, then that would be a correct sentence (in English), but then the Polish translation would have to be "Musiałam/musiałem coś stworzyć". The word "stworzyć" basically means "to create" or "to make" in the context of a creative process.
this is telling me the answer is "I'd to do something" ... this is obviously not correct
The answer is "I had" obviously, but the algorithm doesn't distinguish between the context when shortening "I had" to "I'd" is correct and those when it's not :/ And worse, it sometimes suggests those wrong options.
Why not " I must have done something" as in "I can't remember anything about last week, but I must have done something" How would that be written if not like this?
Yes, this could actually work. Added.
I'd make it unambiguous by saing "Najwyraźniej musiałem coś zrobić", "Najwyraźniej coś zrobiłem" or similar - "najwyraźniej" is the superlative form of "wyraźnie" = "clearly".
Thanks. I don't think I'd ever say "najwyrazniej" because I would never be able to pronounce it and if I did it would not be superlative or pronounced clearly! The words seem to get longer and longer! But it's still fun especially with yours and Alik's help