Donkey's Diary

I will try.



Nie mogłem spać, więc zaparzyłem/zrobiłem sobie kawę.



Rozpaliłem ognisko.



"Było dobre" isn't a good description for a campfire. You should rather describe the atmosphere but not the actual thing. Unless you are some scientist making studies on campfire behavior but then you would use other words.



Potem gadałem z ładną dziewczyną/polką, a następnie zjadłem śniadanie...



Good morning!

I realised that. For some reason, I had the voice of myself as a small child at school on a Monday morning when each of us had to say what we did at the weekend. I went to the shops and it was good and I played with my friends and it was good and I stole a hovercraft and it...


I knew there was some way the następn- word could be used somewhere like that, but I was never quite sure how.

Thanks for your help there. The only thing that worries me is:


It was really atmospheric. Such was the atmosphere, I couldn't possibly describe it in anything other than English. In fact, at the moment, I can't even do that!

The point is "Było dobre" sounds unnatural as it describes campfire (burning wood). You can say "Było fajnie" which means exactly the same thing but it's describing the event.

Point taken.

I just don't know how to say something along these lines:

The trimmings from the privet (Ligustrum ovalifolium) hedge were still wet from having sat out in the rain all last week. I stuffed more newspaper underneath and stuck my hand in with the (zapalniczka!) The bright light of burning paper shone as I watched carefully, pushing the twigs further into the flames, hoping, just hoping they would take.

The paper was spent, and the flames died. Some twigs glowed red, but only pathetically. I blew carefully, feeding it the oxygen it needed, but it wasn't enough. I ran into the house and grabbed a pile of phone bills from my table. I paused only to check how much those texts to Poland [no, I'm not telling you] had cost. I speinted back to the fire, only to see it glowing all the more pathetically.

I crammed all the bits of paper I could find onto what remained of the fire, I struck them one more time with the lighter and the flames began to rise again. I threw more twigs and stick ontop, hoping the paper would dry them out just enough for the fire to take hold.

And suddenly, the fire spat and crackled and the privet finally started to burn.

I threw on more and more of the old hedge trimmings until I had to stand back away from the heat of the roaring blaze.

It was good.

Było fajnie.

Było fajnie.

Was that a description of the fire or of your help making corrections? Or are the corrections a straight-forward dobre? Hang on - I see a mistake here already. corrections are masculine. Or am I just confusing myself even more?

Nie mogłem spać, więc zaparzyłem sobie kawę. Zrobiłem ognisko. Było fajnie, ale nie miałem ptasiego mleczka. Potem rozmawiałem z ładną polką, a następnie zjadłem śniadanie... Dzień dobry!

Dzięki ForsakenOne i polishgirltx.

Zaparzać sie - to brew. Does this include tea, coffee and beer?
Ptasiego mleczka - marshmallows (in some grammatcal case or other. Why is there nothing in my dictionary between ptak and ptaszarnia?

Zaparzyć coś (not się) - to heat. This include tea and coffee. You can't zaparzyć piwo but you can podgrzać piwo (also heat up). To brew beer = Warzyć piwo.

I guess there is no proper translation for Marshmallows. I heard "Pianka", "Pianka na patyku" (for campfire), "Ptasie mleczko" or "Pianka typu marshmallow".

06/06/2008
Nic nie robiłem. Dobranoc.

not good not good....dobranoc donkey...

Mialem okolo cztery... nie!
Czwarta butelke piwo jest prawie pelna... nie!
Piwa nie mam... prawie... tak? Nie!

Jestem podchmielony. Ale tylko malo.

Ale tylko lekko/trochę.
I won't comment on the first three sentences, because I don't quite get what you wanted to say (this "nie" at the ending of every sentence is trochę confusing), so I merely point out two grammatical errors:
Czwarta butelka piwa

This is a good thread 4 u Osioł, u can learn so much this way

It was a stream-of-conciousness kind of thing. Nie should have been a sentence of it's own as I decide on each occasion that I'm a little too out of my depth to finish what I'm trying to say. In the end I semed to settle for a sentence that was wrong anyway. Anything I got right was me, the rest (the majority of it) was just the alcohol.

Damn, I wrote a long text, but closed the window before posting the message. So shortly (this concerns the Polish language stylistics, it's not an information essential for grammatical correctness, so don't bother with reading/remembering it, if you don't need to polish your style):


Miałem około cztery piwa [or: czterech piw]
sounds a little odd to me.
The bottles are countable and their number is relatively low (even for "podchmielony Osiol"), so easy to define and to remember.
If you want to express the approximity in such case, you should rather use a construction similar to the English "I had 4 beers or so." It would be then "Miałem ze cztery piwa". As you can see the preposition "z" is enough. "Z" usually becomes "ze", for phonetical reasons" before 2/3/4 ("Miałem ze 2/3/4 piwa", but "miałem z 5/6/7/8/9/10 piw", and so on.)

ufffff....i thought that you are perfect Krzysztof.... now, i feel better, because you are like all of us ;))

You mean conceited, don't you?
Hint taken :)

not like that :)


hint taken ;)

I found accidentally doing something with the tab button occasionally destroys everything I've been typing on this browser.


If it's for phonetic reasons, what does 'z' do before 21/22/23/24, or even before pół?
(As if I'd have half a beer ish).

"z pół"
In other cases, I think you can use both "z" or "ze" it's up to your competence in pronouncing "z dwadzieścia dziewięć" - if it's to difficult, use "ze". More about this subject could be found in an older thread (not sure if it's still here on the boards or deleted by the careless Admin), where "w" - "we" was discussed, because the rule is similar I guess.

I think if you can already say dwadzieścia dziewięć, adding a little z to the beginning shouldn't be too tricky.

Miałem z pół kawe.

It seems odd where the letter 'e' gets put in sometimes. I thought it occasionally crept in to break up certain combinations of sounds that would be awkwards even for a Pole to pronounce, but from what I've noticed, the rules look quite complicated.

That's like "I had ish half of-coffee" I suppose.

I've had the other halfish now, and I'm about to make another one.
Who writes this kind of stuff in their diary anyway?

Mialem drugi pol kawy. Nastepnie, bede parzyc jeszcze jedna, albo tylko pol.

Marks out of eleven please! (Notice how it's not only alcohol that prevents me from bothering to use all the proper Polish letters. Coffee makes my hands too shakey to click on the symbols.)

One for the diary Osioł, a good link 4 u, there are 2 more parts like this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CrqkpS-SfQ&feature=related

Slightly poor sound quality but very original

osły? ;P

Post edited (twice, second time to comply with Seanus' remark)


Definitely "wypiłem", miałem is NOT used in Polish for eating/drinking.
I had a biscuit - Zjadłem ciastko
I had a beer - Wypiłem piwo
Miałem ciastko/piwo means only that you were in possession of a biscuit/beer. You could have eaten/drunk it or given it to someone else or thrown it away or whatever (you could still have it).


You could also use wypiłem "drugie pół" kawy, but both sound weird, it's really better to say "wypiłem resztę kawy".


Później/potem zaparzę/zrobię jeszcze jedną albo tylko pół.
(no comma before "albo").
Again, logically, how do you make "half a coffee"?
Normal way of expressing it would be "zrobię [sobie] małą kawę"

Edit:
Osioł, if you always invent sentences that are too complicated (or quite absurd), it only makes it harder to focus on the grammatical issues :)


I never heard him asking us for using this spelling :)

It's Osioł, not Osiol ;)

You've seen what I'm like in English. I couldn't change even if I wanted to.

I actually looked at what I normally want to try to say on a daily basis. I drink coffee every day, so I need to be able to talk about making a cup of coffee and forgetting about it until it's gone cold. I get on a bike and ride past a field of horses. I get to work and quite often I need to tell someone about how one of the horses had escaped and was stuck on the wrong side of the fence, oh and by the way, I'm painting my kitchen walls. I might have a beer. I might have two. I might have four and a half beers. I sometimes like to get on a train and spend the day in London, thinking to myself on the way about how it might be so much nicer to travel by hovercraft. If there are ears around, then I talk. It's a habit I suppose.

Should I go through every grammatical case and learn lists of words? Maybe it would be easier.


That's me.


When I first joined, I tried using the letter Ł and it didn't like it.

Hehehe, nice job guys.