17 Comments
None of them. Confusing way to translate it, probably better to say "down the street" since that's how we say it commonly.
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.
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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 :)
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?
