Word
Нам пощастило, тому ми не програли нудний раунд.
Meaning
We got lucky, so we did not lose the boring round.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Questions & Answers about Нам пощастило, тому ми не програли нудний раунд.
Why is нам used instead of ми in Нам пощастило?
Because пощастити uses an impersonal pattern in Ukrainian. The person who experiences the luck is put in the dative case, not the nominative.
So:
- ми = we
- нам = to us
A very literal breakdown is something like Luck happened to us, but in natural English we say We got lucky or We were lucky.
That is why Ukrainian says Нам пощастило, not Ми пощастили.
Why does пощастило end in -ло if the sentence is about we?
Because пощастило is being used impersonally. In this kind of structure, Ukrainian often uses the neuter singular past form.
So even though the meaning is about us, the verb does not agree with ми as a normal personal subject, because there is no real grammatical subject here.
Compare:
- Ми виграли. = We won.
- Нам пощастило. = We got lucky.
In the second sentence, нам is an experiencer in the dative case, and пощастило stays in this impersonal -ло form.
What exactly does пощастило mean?