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- "To jsou stará zvířata?"
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To illustrate the difference, imagine the following answer: "Are those old animals?" - "No, they are old trees." In the other question: "Are those animals old?" the same answer would not make sense: it is understood that we are definitely talking about animals.
This is the alway repeating type of sentence "To je...", "To jsou....", "Jsou to...", "Je to...". You will meet it iver and over and over. And you will find people asking in the respective discussions over and over and over. So you can look into those other discussions for explanations as well.
We imply used "To" here to refer to something indeterminate, both singular and plural.
Thank you for your reply. I do read many discussions without always commenting. This one was relevant, but still incomplete. https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/24800541 And I try to utilise the tips and notes. As a beginner in Czech I have few other resources for usage, though. I like to use dictionaries with usage examples. With the Duo learning system, you can often push ahead, without full understanding. Now I am reviewing the early sections, as one must do in any language learning. Finally, with respect to your last sentence, this structure is familiar in other languages.
The old voice always did exactly that but the new voice sounds like a question to me. We cannot change it anyway. Note that Czech is more "monotone" that what you may be used to:
"It should also be noted that the intonation of ordinary spontaneous Czech is quite flat; when speaking in foreign languages, Czech speakers therefore often come off as bored or disinterested. This “flatness” concerns not only the low pitch range, but also the quite low number of tone units per utterance. We illustrate the frequent absence of significant pitch movements on the following utterance." https://fonetika.ff.cuni.cz/en/czech-phonetics/