What I had found was something maybe it was ichi.moe that said it can be an expression…but the grammar you are definitely correct…
… Genki II page 192 “Questions with Larger Sentences” - you can include a question as part of a longer sentence and express ideas such as “I don’t know when the test is” and “I don’t remember whether Mary came to the party”
Yeah, it’s often used in a subclause with verbs like 分かる to ask if someone knows something (or to say you don’t know something). This seems a bit different to me? But I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.
woo hoo! Finished … and the English version of the book I ordered should probably be here tomorrow (in customs as of now)
Now if anyone of us are really unsure … maybe those translations will be legitimately good enough to clarify things 
Nice job! And since you read those pages in just two days you should be okay when the pace increases. 
First splitting into smaller parts：
りな
は
おもいきって、
そば
を
とおった
女の人
に
たずねて
みた
Rough guess:
Rina found the courage to ask a passerby woman.
Questions:
Thanks in advance!
Pretty much!
I would say Rina boldly tried asking a woman who passed close by.
I’m going to take a stab in reverse order 
Q3. Rina asks the question. Rina is the topic of the sentence, and the woman is marked with に, the directional particle, indicating that the question was being asked to her.
Q2. This usage of みる isn’t literally “to see”. This is a grammar point, where you append みる onto the て-form of a verb - in this case なずねる. It means “to try (doing)”, so in this case she is having a go at asking this woman.
Q1. Yes! The particle is marking the word just before it, そば. The woman is passing through that area. In Japanese, places can be the direct object of motion verbs, like 行く, 来る and 通る.
It would be helpful if you wrote the whole sentence all together too in the future.
Awesome explanations!
Well, it’s a different を. Just like と and から have more than one meaning and grammatical purpose, so does を. 通る is an intransitive verb, and so this can’t be the direct object usage of を. Your interpretation itself (that the woman is traveling through that area) is correct, but I figured it would be good to clarify.
Wow, it really takes a minute to switch gears back into “dialect mode” after reading something “normal”. I was like “what’s あるぐ?!?”. 
うそう！ I started early lol! and had help from my instructor hehehe
I second this… @sansarret I used to do the same (thinking it was to try to help others) so it was less to read, but without the context it’s often harder for others to explain the answer without the whole sentence and then they have to look it up in the book anyway and retype it.
Also if someone has the same question and only posts a piece of the sentence they may not know that the question might already have been answered … make sure you post up the whole sentence and then if you are only having trouble with a single part you can explain what it is that you really need help with.
Thanks for pointing out intransitive verb, I need to pay attention to that. To clarify on the other purpose of を, is this what you meant:
I wanted to reply something similar to what the accepted answer on there states, but I couldn’t find the right words for it. I feel the accepted answer on that page could do a better job of it as well, but it’s better than I was able to come up with!
Absolutely, will do in the future. And I appreciate any suggestions/corrections on this forum etiquette as well, since I’m new and bound to make mistakes unintentionally.
Yeah, basically. Though I agree with the second comment on the accepted answer that the accepted answer is using two different usages in their examples. The link the commenter posted seems really useful too.
well that was short lived…
spent over an hour so far trying to figure out he second sentence in the next weeks reading…(more dialect) … epic fail… can’t post questions yet because there’s no thread (hehehe well I could but … don’t want to do that intentionally)
…sure hope my English version comes soon! haha
Make sure not to rely on it too much (or at least not too soon) though, or you might not learn as much as you could.
I say that as someone who recently read a book in parallel in Japanese and English because I couldn’t understand half of what was going on in the Japanese version.
