Breakdown of Ma bardzo dobry wzrok, jednak jej oczy są zmęczone.
być
to be
mieć
to have
bardzo
very
dobry
good
Questions & Answers about Ma bardzo dobry wzrok, jednak jej oczy są zmęczone.
I know the word for "eye" is oko. Why is the plural oczy instead of oka?
Because eyes come in pairs, oko uses an ancient irregular plural form called the "dual" number. You will see this pattern with other paired body parts, like ucho (ear) becoming uszy. If you see the regular plural oka, it actually means "drops of fat in soup" or "mesh in a net", not human eyes!
Why does the adjective zmęczone (tired) end in -e?
It has to agree with oczy. In the plural, Polish adjectives have two forms: masculine personal (for groups with at least one man) and non-masculine personal (for everything else, including body parts). Since oczy falls into the second group, the adjective takes the -e ending.
The phrase bardzo dobry wzrok is the object of the sentence. Shouldn't it change its ending for the accusative case?
It is actually in the accusative case! Wzrok (eyesight) is a masculine inanimate noun. For masculine inanimate nouns, the accusative form looks exactly the same as the nominative (dictionary) form, so the adjectives bardzo dobry do not change either.
The sentence starts with just Ma (has). How do we know it is "she" who has good eyesight?
Polish usually drops the subject pronoun (like ona) when it is clear from the context. Here, the second part of the sentence uses jej (her) to talk about the eyes, which gives us a strong clue that we are talking about a woman.