• sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.cc
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    6 months ago

    It’s because “home” in this formation is an adverb, whereas school is a noun. You can be an adverb- I’m surprised, I’m exhuasted… - but you must be at a noun (or on, or in, or some other preposition).

    • jack@monero.town
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      6 months ago

      You mean adjective, right? Adverb describes the verb, like talking “loudly” or “quietly”

      • TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        This is the adverb form. If it were an adjective, it nearer to the noun and not sperated by the verb like in “He stole home plate.” “Home” is modifying the state of being or “am”.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          with the addition that most languages - especially romance languages - have irregular verbs and constructions.

          e.g. in french you say “I have 30 years” to say you are 30 years old. in English you say “I am 30” to say you are 30 years old. It makes no sense to say you are the number 30 or you have 30 years. But no one really thinks about it.

    • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Ironically students of foreign language often cling to these grammatical structures and are less confused by the same word in different contexts.

  • ben16w@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    One of my favourites to think about is “How are you?”. Taken literally that question makes no sense. “How are you?” “Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there…”

  • siipale@sopuli.xyz
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    6 months ago

    Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.

    It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    Not really German here:
    “Ich bin zuhaus(e)” -> “I’m home”
    “Ich bin in der Bäckerei”, “Ich bin bei der Post”, “Ich bin bei den Großeltern” -> “I’m at the bakery”, I’m at the post office", “I’m at my grandparents place” (or “I’m with my grandparents”)

    • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Small correction:

      “Ich bin bei den Großeltern” → “I’m at my grandparents (or grandparents’)”

      “I’m at my grandparents’ place” only exist as “I’m at my grandparents‘ house” → “Ich bin im Haus meiner Großeltern”

  • guacupado@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Home is used differently than house. I’m home makes sense. I’m house doesn’t (which is your school and post office equivalent).

  • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Only a little.

    Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

    The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

    This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

    Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
    So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

    Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.

    • ParabolicMotion@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      Is it truly an adverb, though. Would that statement be considered proper English? It is a colloquialism, or some might say a metaphor, but is it considered an appropriate use of the English language to use that type of phrase? I could just imagine someone’s English professor returning an essay with a red line through that phrase.

  • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Absolutely. I’m an ESL teacher in Korea, and getting my students to use prepositions properly is a significant portion of my job. The difference between something like “He is coming to you.” and “He is coming for you.” isn’t obvious at all if you think about it, but there are definitely proper and improper use cases for them.