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- Topic: Polish >
- "Rzadko biegamy w parku."
30 Comments
594
It would sound extremely strange, "at" being used to describe static position. We can say "She's at the park" to say where she is, but running involves movement around a space or area, in which case we use "in". I would never say "I've been walking at the park", for example, always "in".
As a native American English speaker, "at the park" sounds more natural to me than "in the park".
"We run in the park, rarely" would be OK, if a little bit stilted.
- 594
Not according to my EFL bible, Practical English Usage, by Michael Swan.
But it does work if you use it with "very" and a time expression - "We run in the park very rarely these days".
Why is park taking the locative case here? If this is a verb of motion, wouldn't it be accusative instead?
You are perhaps thinking of Latin/German, where motion towards something takes accusative and motion from takes ablative/dative.
In this case, the motion is happening in a place, indicated by "w", and is therefore locative (a case relating to a location or place) is used
Actually, i was thinking about another slavic language, the russian language, like in this example: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/11856389 In which the accusative describes motion of the verb побежать, associated with the preposition в, that i was assuming it would work like "w" in polish in front of a verb of motion. You can see it takes accusative in russian. But that might be not the case in polish, i suppose.
Indeed "w" can take accusative, just as "в" can take the prepositional case :-) . The "в" in the Russian example has the children running to the park. In the Polish example, "we" are already in the park when we do our rare bit of running, hence "w" + locative.
"Rarely do we run in the park" This is the correct translation according to duolingo, at least in my exercise. Could anyone explain me why this "do"?
In my Duolingo, the correct answer is "We rarely run in the park."
"Rarely do we run," the "do" is used for emphasizing "rarely." Rarely, we run. We run rarely. Rarely do we run. We do run rarely.
'We rarely go running in the park'?? Quite common with activities in English to put a verb + gerund collocation like this. I was a little surpised my answer was given as incorrect. Can this be added?
It's hard for Duolingo to have every colloquialism in its database, especially when there are so many alternatives meaning the same thing in English. Since this is a Polish course for English-speakers, it's more important to get the Polish right, than the English
I agree with this, that 'the correct Polish is more important'. Actually, quite often when I try to think of something in Polish I remember it better by first thinking of the more literal form in English. For example, with the dative case it helps me to add (in my head) words like 'give' before the verb 'help'. Thanks for the reply!
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It is maybe more useful or more effective to think directly in Polish, trying to answer without thinking in English first.
The native speakers working on this course both claim that is too unusual to accept such a word order.
I'm a native speaker too, I guess this Polish English that my friends speak is getting to me XD
I just asked my mom too and she agrees there's nothing wrong with it. After that I looked it up and apparently we shouldn't start sentences with adverbs. I guess natives like me mess up too XD
I've just checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English for sentences which begin with "Rarely [pronoun] [verb]" and got 4 results.
"[Pronoun] rarely [verb]", however showed 545 results.
So, it is indeed almost unheard of.
