"Zawsze kupowałem jedenaście cytryn."
Translation:I always used to buy eleven lemons.
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What about "I would always buy eleven lemons".
It's a little bit of a fragment, but isn't this sentence anyways a fragment, if someone told you "I always used to buy eleven lemons" you would be like wot
But your sentence is totally different: you are talking about the future, and the sentence to translate is in the past.
How so? I understand "I would always" as a construction with the meaning of "I always used to", but why wouldn't it be used in the future meaning? As in "If I earned enough money, I would always buy eleven lemons"?
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Sure, it can refer to what the future was from the vantage point of the past (future in the past) but this should not be conflated with actual future tense, which "would" can never mean. After all, "would" is the "past tense" form of "will".
Ok, in general you are right, that "would" most of the times is used when talking about the past not the future. But in conditional clauses it can sometimes mean a future action as well. Ex. "I would never do that" can refer to the past and the future. "If I asked you, would you come?" again talking about the future action.
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That's not future, it's conditional. It's best to think about conditional as a tense of its own, the tense of being dependent on another action.
I don't think "always bought" seems okay, and even if it is in English, then it translates to "zawsze kupiłem" which doesn't really make sense in Polish.
"I always bought eleven lemons" is a perfectly good English sentence, but I think it would primarily be used in a context where you're saying when you always bought the lemons. As in: "I used to go to that store over there, and whenever I did, I always bought eleven lemons."
All that said, I feel much better translating "zawsze kupowałem" as "I always used to buy" than as "I always bought".
I've noticed that in American " I WOULD do X" can mean "I repeatedly or habitually did X" as well as being the conditional and expressing possibility as in English English.
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"zawsze kupiłem" does not really make sense in Polish but "kupowałbym zawsze" does really make sense then? (kto pyta nie błądzi)
"zawsze kupowałbym" is a hypothetical (If there was some special offer on lemons, I would definitely decide to always buy 11 of them), but it's correct.
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"Zawsze kupowałem jedenaście cytryn." wg powinno mieć tłumacznie "I have always bougth eleven lemos". Z kolei "I always used tu buy eleven lemons." powinno zostać przetłumaczone: "Zawsze zwykłem kupować jedenaście cytryn."
"I have always bought" sugeruje, że wciąż kupuję jedenaście cytryn, czego może polskie zdanie nie wyklucza, ale to prędzej byłoby jednak "zawsze kupuję".
"I used to buy" to naprawdę jest dobre tłumaczenie niedokonanego "zawsze kupowałem". Natomiast można dodać dosłowne "zwykłem kupować" do akceptowanych odpowiedzi, czemu nie.
Oh, I don't know why I wrote that. We don't accept it, luckily, it was just my mistake in the comment. Fixed now, thanks.
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*I was always buying eleven lemons." But now I failed unfortunately and won't do that further.
I believe that suggests that I still buy eleven lemons (every time I'm in the store), which would actually make it Present Tense "Zawsze kupuję".
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Wouldn't that be "I have always been buying"? "I have always bought" rather suggests that I've recently changed my habit, so I'd say it's acceptable.
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"I have always bought" doesn't require me to have recently changed my habit, although that's one possibility. Since torronoir's sentence doesn't provide further context you would assume my habit is continuing. Thus Jellei is right and it would translate to the Polish present. In regards to "I have always been buying" I don't think "always" works well with the perfect continuous tenses. "always" has too much of a habitual implication.
When "I have always bought" is provided in context it may or may not imply that my habit is continuing. The context is crucial to translate it into Polish correctly. After all the Polish perfective/imperfective dichotomy, which is a lot to do with whether an action is completed or not, doesn't align with the English perfect/non-perfect which is about whether the action is tethered to the time of the verb's tense (but not necessarily completed).
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Thank you, Ben, that makes a lot of sense! Tenses are one of the hardest topics in English grammar and I still get confused sometimes...
As far as I know "I used to do this and that" includes the idea of doing so "always" - so in my opinion "always" can be dropped in this sentence.
- 1084
"I have always bought eleven lemons" refers to the past but it was marked wrong. Why?
It has been expained by Jellei and BenYoung in this tread. Please look it up. Present Perfect is translated into Present tense in Polish, and "always" doesnt belong there.