"Ona idzie do szkoły."
Translation:She is going to school.
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In Slavic languages there is no continuous tense. There is only one word which implies, that situation is happening in the continuous tense. It is added to the meaning and means time condition. The continuous moment is described as "right now", literraly translated into English language. Please take my word for it...
To be honest, I don't understand about half of your comment, but the part that I do get, is definitely wrong.
There are about a dozen verb pairs which do distinguish habitual from continuous action. They are usually referred to as verbs of motion or verbs of movement:
- biegać/biec, jeździć/jechać, pływać/płynąć, nosić/nieść, wozić/wieźć, latać/lecieć, chodzić/iść.
The ones implying continuous action are called determinate (biec, jechać, iść...), whereas the habitual ones are referred to as indeterminate (biegać, jeździć, chodzić...).
But please don't take my word for it, look it up...
See here: https://www.clozemaster.com/blog/polish-verbs-of-motion/
Generally, Present Simple "to go (on foot), to walk" translate to "chodzić", Present Continuous "to be going (on foot), to be walking" translate to "iść", unless it's just "walking" around without any specific direction/destination, which is again "chodzić".
And the school context somehow messes with this distinction because of some idiomatic English usage :/
I think this whole discussion sheds light on something my Polish fiancee says. Whereas we would say, "she goes to school", meaning she attends school; my partner says "she is walking to school" when she uses English.
I'm finding an interesting side effect od this course is a greater understanding of the issues facing ESOL speakers, particularly dealing with the different tenses and lack of articles in Polish.
I've read the comments, and I still can't wrap my head around why "She goes to school" isn't correct or the difference between "chodzę" and "idę", and this is my biggest problem with Duolingo. They never taught me the difference, and now, I'm just getting frustrated that all my answers are wrong.
It's clearly a problem, just based on how many comments there are for ALL these types of questions. It's not fair to penalize people for getting it wrong when we were never taught.
Thank you. I have always wondered what the distinction was between the two. You do realize though that no such temporal differentiation is made in the English. This leaves the question of translation a valid one as the English text may not give you the needed information to render that specification. Do you have any tios in this regard - apart from limited reliance on context?