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Which preposition for 'at'? [58]
Chaza, Derevon is right. Try to learn whole phrases and sentences rather than single words. A word-for-word translation may to some extent work with very simple sentences, but don't try it on idioms and compound sentences.
Out of the three sentences you provided, the first and the second are understandable though not correct. The last one however is a big mess, no Pole would be able to make heads nor tails out of it.
Once, when in he US, an older Pole asked me to help him with his homework. He didn't speak English and was attending some kind of a language school. I said OK, he brought two beers and off we went.
The sentence in his book read: This is a table.
'What's that in Polish?', asked pan Staszek.
'To jest stół.'
Pan Staszek began counting.
'This=to. Ok. Is=jest. OK. A=stół. OK. Now, what's table?'
'No. A table=stół.'
'Why are there two English words for a Polish one? And if one is stół, then what's the other one for?'
I tried to explain the notion of a pronoun to him, but he failed to understand that for one simple reason: as the word 'stół' had the third position in the Polish sentence, anything on the third position in the English sentence had to be 'stół'.
Well, eventually we moved on to questions and here pan Staszek seemed to regain the lost ground.
'Czy to jest stół? One, two, three, four. Is this a table? One, two, three, four. Great!'
He grabbed a pencil and started underwiriting meticuously:
Is
Czy
this
to
a
jest
table
stół
There was no way to convince him that not everything was right there. It had to be right, as four words equalled four words! The beer was good though.
See what I mean, Chaza?
Happy New Year :)
