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- Topic: Korean >
- "저는 길을 걸어요."
26 Comments
None of them. Confusing way to translate it, probably better to say "down the street" since that's how we say it commonly.
571
Why not, "I walk the street"? How does one determine whether it is "down" the street or "up" the street from the statement presented?
I think the literal translation would be "I walk the street", but that comes with connotations that don't match the Korean meaning, so another word was added to make a more faithful translation.
You know, it may just be better to provide a small analysis of the breakdown on each answer, right or wrong.
Transliteral: "I+SUBJ road+OBJ walk+POLITE" Initial Translation to English (Accepted): "I walk the road" Semantically Acceptable Answers in English: "I walk along the road," "I walk down the road" Etc, etc.
That way it would be easy to know if Duolingo will accept variations for certain words, and it would be nice to know what is going on behind the scenes from the get go on new phrases and verbs.
Actually yeah, I would love if Duolingo did that.
- 1003
걸어요 reminds me of correr. Considering the loanword 빵,it wouldn't surprise me if this were a loanword (I know running and walking are not the same,but it's close enough). Either way it's a nice memonic
A street has buildings and whatnot next to it and its primary purpose is to make these accessible, whereas a road connects places (towns, distant neighborhoods, etc). Think "Main Street" vs the county road.
However, this distinction is mostly historical and the two terms have come to mean roughly the same thing. These days, I think most people think of a road as being generally bigger or higher speeds than a street and that's about the extent of it.
I'm not sure if Korean makes the distinction and many (most?) native English speakers don't either.
Au contraire!
English users definitely have many distinctions, as you pointed out, and far more than just those, but the real point is whether or not it matters.
This is where we get into the sticky realm of semantics versus pragmatics.
If I say "street" like you said, it has semantic baggage that colors it in your mind to be a type of trail you go down.
I would alter what you asserted and instead say that most people don't realize this more subconscious activity and don't /consider it/ as a meaningful distinction.
This happens much, much more that we know, and a far easier to understand example is saying "Drive down the road" or "Drive down the highway". That's a very clear example of something that actually, semantically, is very close, but most English speakers immediately know the difference.
Finally, I would point out to all fellow Korean learners that Korean, and every other language, have just as much minutiae, but never get discouraged, we can do it with practice :)
Footnote: A short list of several synonyms and more or less related words to "road" that have some level of difference native English speakers just have some intuition about:
Path
Road
Street
Way
Trail
Highway
Freeway
Avenue
Several others...
Point is some of these are notably different, others not so much, but every single one of them are quite connected. (And this is before getting into modifying adjectives and prepositions that could alter how you indicate travel on the path!) Pretty interesting stuff :)
To me (a native American), a street is a four or more lane paved path with traffic signals. A road is usually two lanes and may or may not be paved, like a 'backwoods dirt road'.
- 571
I am a native American and, broadly speaking, to me a street is/can be one or more lanes that are in a town or a city while roads are in the countryside, except for streets that are currently named "road" because at one time the street was a "road" but because of urban expansion it was incorporated into the town or city. In some older cities in the United States some streets are even named "trail" because historically the street began as a trail that was by made by earlier inhabitants or settlers/pioneers.
So in Korean would you only say " I walk the street" to express "I walk along the street" or is there a word correlating to the word "along" or "down the . . ." that could also be used?
~을/를 따라
따르다 means to follow so if you want to say "along the road" it would be "길을 따라" or "길 따라" in Korean(을/를 can be dropped in speech). Of course in different contexts it can have other translations too.
Fun fact: There's actually a bakery near where I live called 빵길 따라 and the English name is "Along bread cafe" which doesn't make sense, but their bread is nice so who cares haha
