"Jak ses dostal tak blízko k jezeru?"

Translation: How did you get so close to the lake?

[JohnBraga1]

I thought blízko generally took genitive, without k?

[VladaFu]

"blízko jezera" is possible, although will be more common for a location. "Jsem blízka jezera." - "I am near the lake.".

"blízko k jezeru" is literally "close to the lake" meaning a movement. To get close to the lake. Dostat se blízko k jezeru. This is used quite generally, not just for movement verbs although it is pretty common with them. You can also just "být blízko něčemu", although I like the genitive more. Also in the "mít blízko k někomu/něčemu" idiom (have a close relation to something or someone).

"Jak jsi se dostal tak blízko jezera?" is more about the location. How did you get to the location so close to the lake?

Comparing the actual collocations in the corpus https://kontext.korpus.cz/view?q=~D9t1O9HAPsK1 https://kontext.korpus.cz/view?q=~q5htRy7kFeuL might be instructive. I do not know if the links survive for too long, though.

[JohnBraga1]

děkuji pěkně

[tatka_]

Why cannot i use "how did you get so near to the lake" ? What is wrong for "near"?

[BoneheadBass]

Seems to me that "near" should be acceptable, but I think "close" MAY be used more often in a sentence like this.

[VladaFu]

We do accept near the lake. Do you think near to the lake is also fine?

[BoneheadBass]

I couldn't explain why, but "CLOSE TO the lake" and "NEAR THE lake" sound fine, but "NEAR TO the lake" sounds a little odd... not necessarily wrong, but odd, compared to the other two. It would be interesting to hear what other native English speakers think.