"Ty mašiny jsou dobré."

Translation: Those machines are good.

[Gab_Nunes]

Is there any difference between "stroje" and "mašiny"?

[VladaFu]

It has been covered seversl times. Rather than searching I will repeat the gist here. Stroj is the default neutral word. Mašina is a colloquial word that is also (even more colloquially) used to denote a train locomotive (train engine) or some road vehicles (esp. motorcycles).

[cboteros]

I need help clarifying the difference between "Ten, Ta, To" and "Ty, Ti, Ta" because even my wife (who is Czech) is not able to describe the difference... For instance, for this phrase I wrote "These machines..." But I got corrected that it should be "Those machines..." But my wife says that "Ty" can be used to say "these" also (as for things that are close to the person who is speaking)

[AgnusOinas]

"Ten" (and its variants, "ta", "to", etc.) is a demonstrative pronoun with an unspecified distance. It usually corresponds to English "that", sometimes to English "the" (when we want to stress the definiteness), occasionally even to English "this".

When we want to specify the distance, we use two other sets of demostrative pronouns:

If the object is far from the speaker, we use "tamten" ("tamta", "tamto" etc.), which corresponds to "that", but more accurately to "that ... over there".

If we want to stress that the object is close to the speaker, we use "tento" ("tato", "toto"...), which corresponds well to "this". The more colloquial version is "tenhle" ("tahle" ...).

So "Ten, ta, to..." normally doesn't say anything about the distance (this x that). When your wife said that "ty" could be used for "things that are close to the speaker" - yes, but in that case it would translate as "the" in English rather than "these". I hope this makes it more clear.

[Squeeeem]

Thank you so much, I was struggling with this too

[Randonneur3]

ty mašiny jsou dobré - rejected -perhaps the parser isn't reading this right. It should ignore the double space that this forum page's parser has removed before dobré. Duo again omits an option to report as My answer should be accepted. Is this a Beta test report?

[VladaFu]

Wat kind of exercise? You are commentig Czech to English.

Please make a screenshot next time.

[beelate]

Is there any distinction in Czech between the moral quality of goodness (She is a good person) and quality of construction or usefulness?

[VladaFu]

Distinction in which sense?

Dobrý is pretty much equivalent to good. You can have a good king, good food, good will, which are dobrý král, dobré jídlo, dobrá vůle.

[Molli262143]

I thought I understood that ty is equivalent to the personal pronoun you (ty jsi, for example) . So why is it being used here as the plural adjective "those"?

[AgnusOinas]

They are homonyms like the words "lie" (to recline / to tell falsehood).

1) personal pronoun "ty" - informal/singular "you" (thou)

2) demonstrative pronoun "ten" (that) - its plural feminine form happens to be "ty" without any connection to the personal pronoun

(neither is an adjective)

[VladaFu]

"Ty" can either be a singular personal pronoun meaning "you, thou", or it can be a plural demonstrative pronoun meaning "the, those". Some words are simply homonyms, that's all.