I posted a moment on HelloTalk about how I went paddle boarding and swimming today. I received several corrections, but I guess I don’t know enough grammar to understand the subtle differences in the corrections. Could someone clarify?
My original post was:
今日泳いとパドルボードに行きました！泳ぐ好きですか？
These were the different corrections:
今日、水泳とパドルボード をやりに行きました！泳ぐ のは 好きですか？
今日泳い だりパドルボード をしに行きました！泳ぐ ことは 好きです？
今日、パドルボード と泳ぎに行きました！泳ぐのは好きですか？
I’ve bolded the parts that have been added that I don’t understand, whether that be the words themselves or why they’re necessary… thanks in advance
I’m not sure what you were trying to do with 泳い, so maybe that’s where some confusion is coming from.
If you want to talk about swimming as a noun, it’s either 水泳 (pronounced すいえい), 泳ぎ, or 泳ぐの / 泳ぐこと, but I don’t think 泳ぎ is used very often. And the way you handle them grammatically depends on which you choose.
If you want to say you like something with __ が好き, that thing has to be a noun, it can’t be a verb.
Putting の or こと at the end of a verb makes it into a noun. But be aware that those have slightly different nuances and meanings that are a bit more than maybe we want to bite off here.
That’s all pretty basic stuff. You put と between your swimming and paddle boat. So you need 2 nouns there.
But 泳い is not a word. You have to use 泳ぎ、水泳 or something simillar (all mean “swimming” as a noun).
The same with 好き. In english you would say “Do you like swimming?”. So you have a noun in this position. But 泳ぐ is a verb. So you first have to “nounify” (nominalize) it. That’s what the の and こと after the verb are used for. は then marks this as the topic.
That makes sense! Yeah I didn’t know the word for swimming, so I just did a quick Google search and hoped for the best. Definitely not the most reliable way to learn vocab. In the second correction, what would the だり and the しmean?
In all of the corrections of the first sentence they used the construction: verb stem+に行く. So they added a verb clarifying what action it was that you went to do.
Using たり (or だり in the case of a む / ぶ / ぐ-ending verbs) is a way of listing verbs in an incomplete list, which you then still have to tie together with the verb する.
The し comes from the に行く grammar point, which means you went somewhere for the purpose of doing a thing. You have to use a stem form of the verb before the に, and し is the stem for する
泳ぎに行く means to go swimming
泳いだり…しに行く means to go swimming and other things not mentioned
EDIT: The reason they used に行く, by the way, is because you can’t go to a noun that isn’t a place. But you can go to do an action that is a noun, and that’s what に行く does.
