"Czekanie na pociąg to nie podróżowanie."
Translation:Waiting for a train is not traveling.
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I though actually it was a quote or something. Or maybe that it had some philosophical meaning like if you want to do something, do it, waiting is not doing. Now that I've read the comments I see it's just a sentence, so it's a little bit disappointing)
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They could have brought in a Jerry Lee Lewis song reference, but did not have recognised the opportunity. Big miss.
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It's not very natural. Your construction is using a false subject "it" to postpone the real subject "waiting for a train". We do this sometimes, for example when the subject is an infinitive - "It's not nice to be kept waiting", but the natural position for a gerund subject ("waiting ...") is in normal subject position, at the beginning of the sentence.
Wouldn't the Polish for that be "... na pociągi..." which is slightly different?
Yeah, that can be rendered easily by using "pociągi". Sure, it's very close, but different.
That's close, but still "a journey" is a noun that translates to "podróż", not the gerund form "podróżowanie".
I don't know, "podróżowanie" is a gerund and thus I think it's more... general. "travel" as a noun is equivalent to "podróż".
A sentence that uses two nouns derived from verbs.
It is not a "meaningful sentence". I can imagine some person saying - we spent 10 hours traveling here, and other saying well only two, the rest was waiting for a train, and that is not traveling.
Could someone explain when and why "to" is used instead of "jest" (both meaning "is")?
Maybe "waiting for a train that is not travelling" would be better?
From the point of view of grammar, that is not a sentence... you could probably use a dash between them and write "Waiting for a train - that is not travelling", but we can't accept it.
I've heard "to wait on" in the sense of "to wait for" a couple of times already in American English, but I'm still not convinced that this is ok in standard English.
Fair enough but where do you draw the line between being overly pedantic about English and just saying - yeah, that sounds about right. Because in every day conversation if you were to drop 'I'm waiting on a train' absolutely nobody would bat an eyelid at that, nor would they if you said 'I'm waiting for a train'. In short - both are perfectly fine in English and we're splitting hairs here.
I apologize... as it turns out, at some point we decided to accept "to wait on" despite all doubts.
The problem is that "waiting on a train that is not travelling" doesn't work without a comma, since "that" splits it into two seperate clauses. In the Polish translation it's still one clause. That is a significant structural change to the sentence, so here we decided to draw a line.
Rule of thumb: If the Polish sentence starts with "To (jest/są)" you can translate it with it is/this is/that is/these are/those are. But if it's somewhere in the middle and the sentence doesn't have a comma, just use the copula "to be".
in na very similar sentence podrozowani- ended 'u' not 'e' Why? As usual excuse absence of diacritical marks.
It was a different case, after all this is a gerund, so it's a type of a noun.
I see this was "Oni rozmawiali o podróżowaniu", so "about travelling" -> Locative.
This is a simple "X is (not) Y" sentence, so it's either "to nie podróżowanie" (Nominative) or "nie jest podróżowaniem" (Instrumental).
"podróżowanie" is a gerund (a verbal noun), while "journey" is just a simple noun, translating to "podróż". Close, but different.
