Breakdown of Zrobił mi się wielki siniak na barku.
ja
I
się
oneself
na
on, at / to (motion toward) / for (a meal) / for (waiting for)
zrobić
to do / to make (someone something)
wielki
great (large, grand)
bark
shoulder
siniak
bruise
Questions & Answers about Zrobił mi się wielki siniak na barku.
Why do we use mi instead of a possessive pronoun like mój?
This sentence uses the dative of inalienable possession. When something happens to a part of your body, Polish prefers to use a dative pronoun (mi - to me) alongside the verb rather than a possessive pronoun (mój - my) with the noun. It literally means a huge bruise formed to me on the shoulder, which emphasizes that you are the person experiencing this physical event or detriment.
Why use the reflexive verb zrobił się to mean 'I got'?
While English uses the active 'I got' for things like bruises or pimples, Polish treats these as spontaneous occurrences. Zrobić się means 'to make itself' or 'to form'. Polish puts the bruise in charge of the action, so the verb is in the third-person masculine past tense to match the noun siniak.
If the translation is 'I got', why doesn't the sentence use a first-person verb?
Because the grammatical subject of the Polish sentence is wielki siniak (a huge bruise) in the nominative case. The English sentence makes 'I' the subject, but Polish makes the bruise the subject doing the forming, while you (mi) are simply the indirect object receiving the consequence of the action.
What case is barku and why does it have an -u ending?
It is in the locative case because of the preposition na indicating a fixed location. The nominative form is bark (shoulder). While many masculine nouns take an -ie ending in the locative, bark takes -u to avoid the awkward consonant mutation that would happen if you added a front vowel to a word ending in the velar consonant -k.
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