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- "I do not go to the office."
"I do not go to the office."
Translation:会社に行きません。
45 Comments
Without more context, that could be the meaning. While へ seems to be more limited as a particle (indicating movement direction, as you said), に seems to be more flexible for making a time, place, or location (but not direction, as in North, South, etc).
Personally, I use へ whenever appropriate, over に because I'll likely also be referencing a place or time, and using a particle repeatedly sounds weird
If you talks about any specific place, for example school, office and home and so forth, the places should be put following the へ. It means towards what the place. You can use へ to past sentenses, present sentenses and future sentenses. But to mention the place should be had an article. If you need to say the places, you should say the place with an article otherwise sometimes the meaning of sentenses might be changed.
かいしゃ is company or office, に and へ (pronounced like え here) are particles that designated movement and direction. Either can be used in this sample sentence as there is no context to go by. Other comments here describe their differences. 行く is the verb "to go" and needs to be conjugated to the negative. Thus 行く becomes 行きません. Slap it all together and you get かいしゃにいきません。In your defense, not much is explained in these lessons.
I see this has become of some concern. Well, in my studies I found へ (he) to be used only when someone truly moves. If one remains stationery the particle is void and replaced by に (ni). For example: "I do not go to school at eight o'clock"= "八(hachi)時(ji)に学校(gakkou)へ行きません(ikimasen)"? While it appears validated, the correct form is actually "八時に学校に行きます". This is a simplified statement, but for colloquial terms, think of へ when one is truly going somewhere, and for negatives に。
That would be a neat feature if you wanted to take the learning process slower/then deactivate it when you're ready for kanji.
Personally I found it a bit rushed when it jumped from Hiragana to Katakana to then Kanji.
If the feature was available, I probably would have used it.
That being said... I did come here to learn as much as I can and if duolingo translator thinks introducing kanji at this stage is for the best then let me at it!! ☺
It helps to go back to previous lessons where they introduce Kanji and do them over from the beginning multiple times. I did that with Hiragana and it helped a lot!
Also it might help you learn the kanji by writing them down. Keep in mind traditionally they each have a very particular stroke order so if you're really devoted to learning Japanese the right way... Then you can learn the stroke order for each Kanji as you learn it's equivalent pronunciation in Hiragana. (Example: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/ )
That would be mad awesome practice!!
Best of luck & definitely message the developers with your idea. Who knows, they might implement something like that.~ (Dev email: android@duolingo.com )
Cheers!
"は" is a particle, it can be used in the positive form as much as in the negative form, it is used to mark the topic you are talking about. "に" is also a particle and is used to mark time, location, etc, that you are talking about. Particles always come after the word they talk about, in this case 「会社に行きません」(かいしゃにいきません) the particle 「に」comes after 「かいしゃ」so the "ni" is talking about the "office" and office is not a time but a location so that "ni" means location 「いきます」 means "to go", the suffix "せん" negativates the word so 「いきません] means "not go". かいしゃ-に-いきません (office to not go) the subject is omitted on japanese but we may guess he is talking about himself soooo it's "I-office-to-not go" in plain english is "I do not go to the office". Sorry if it's confusing.
は can replace が and を to stress negation by making the subject/object the topic to show contrast, but here 会社 is not the one doing the action or receiving an action, it is a location. You could though double particle 会社には行きません ("As for the office, I will not go"), I don't know if that is currently in the list of acceptable answers but it should be fine. Without the location particle though it sounds like "The office will not go" as in the office is the thing not going somewhere...
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Fun fact:
会社 = kaisha = lit. meeting-office = office/workplace.
社会 = shakai = lit. office-meeting = society/community.