"강아지가 어려운 언어로 말해요."
Translation:The puppy is speaking in a difficult language.
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Doesn't Korean make the distinction between simple present and present continuous like English does?
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Thanks!
Hey Ash-Fred, you're doing a great job! Just so you know... Thank you for helping out!
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I asked this before too. In English there is a distinction in using the present simple and the present continuous. The first indicates a habit (I brush my teeth (every day)), the second indicates the action you are doing right now (I am brushing my teeth (as we speak)). In Korean they do not make this distinction.
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/24585635$from_email%3Dcomment&comment_id%3D32292255
From what I understand so far here and other resources, "강아지 " in this lesson is a word for a baby dog or a young dog, not older or adult dogs like " 강아지 ".
Otherwise, I can understand why we might think about "dog" as a choice.
In a way, it is a great sentence of contrast and extremes with memory triggers: puppy, speeaking, language, difficult.
Cute?
I understand that -를 marks words as objects and -로 would usually be translated in English with a preposition, so here "언어로" means we are speaking in that language. Would a native Korean speaker ever use -를 to talk about speaking a language?
In other words, does "강아지가 어려운 언어로 말해요" make any sense? I'm having a hard time with really internalizing when to use -를 versus -로, since sometimes the former works... as in "한국어를 잘해요" ...
Any advice appreciated!
Since I asked this question it's become a little clearer to me. In English, the word "speak" can be transitive of intransitive; thus we can say "I am speaking English" (where "English" is a direct object) or "I am speaking in English" (in which "English" is part of the adverbial phrase "in English").
It's loosely similar in Korean, that verbs can either take objects or not. The verb 말하다 does not take a language as an object, so we can append [language][으]로 to indicate we are 말하다-ing by the use of that language.
하다, however, can take the name of a language as a direct object, so we can simply use 을/를 to indicate this.
In other words... it very roughly aligns like so:
저는 한국어를 해요. (I speak Korean.)
저는 한국어로 말해요. (I speak in Korean.)
Gosh, that seems like a messy explanation, but it's starting to make sense to me.
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So dog is considered wrong but puppy is correct ? Why? I don't think there's a different word for dog