"Biegam rzadziej niż jej mąż."
Translation:I run less often than her husband.
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"I run more seldom than her husband". according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/seldom , 'more seldom' is ok as is 'seldomer'. Reported.
I am concerned that the Duo team is adding alternatives that are not good English without proper vetting. And I personally do not consider a Google search for frequency as proper vetting. This "seldomer" issue is not the only example I have seen. Yes, I know we are not teaching English here, but there is no reason to add poor English to the list of correct choices just because someone suggests it. I gather that there are non-native speakers of English here learning Polish also, and I don't think we should be reinforcing poor English.
it depends on your dialect. I think most Americans would see "more seldom" as perfectly natural and correct. It is even part of a phrase: "More seldom than not." But for what it's worth, I believe that one originated in a Bush speech…
Interesting comments, I also had run less and your explanation makes your point valid. The problem is in the states, depending on where you live, everyone has their regional dialect and way of expressing them selves. I believe there are few languages that are as fluid as English and as such a certain criteria must must be met for stability. Of course that's only my opinion.
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I am running and I go running can mean the same thing in English. "I am running" does not necessarily mean continuously. It would be quite proper to say in English, "I am running everyday" without implying that I never stop.
That is perfectly fine English, and implies that the habit of running for exercise is continuous, not that the running itself never stops.
I don't quite understand why I can't say "I run more rarely than her husband does". It is quite acceptable English.
What about "Biegam mniej częściej niż jej mąż"? That's what I would have said before Duolingo! Is it correct or am I way off the mark?
Mniej and częściej are both comparatives, so you'd be basically saying "less more often".
Technically, "mniej często" would be grammatical, however, a language corpus search revealed that it's used about a thousand times less often than "rzadziej" and it also doesn't sound natural to me in this particular context.
Thanks for clarifying. Thanks also for your comments regarding "mniej często" — that would have been my next question!
You've killed two birds with one stone! Cheers! :)
You keep talking about language corpus searches, could you share the URIs of the resources you use? I have been trying to find a good Polish dictionary with examples, so far not much luck, probably due to my being in the US and google not fetching the sites I am after due to geographical "relevance".
Here's the corpus search engine I use most frequently:
http://nkjp.pl/poliqarp/nkjp300/query/
And here's the information on how to use it:
http://nkjp.pl/poliqarp/help/en.html
If you're looking for a dictionary which contains examples, then I recommend this one:
If you enter "nkjp.pl/poliqarp" into the search box on top of this page, you will find around 40 examples of search syntaxes. Ok, sometimes it's the syntax itself, sometimes it's more descriptive, I admit to not being very consistent here.
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Kind of remarkable, that in Polish 'rzadziej' is much more common than 'mniej często', while in English 'seldomer' (or 'more rarely', or the like) is much less common than 'less often'. I don't suppose this holds in general; it looks like the English here is an exceptional peculiarity.
