The verb ‘hurry’ is different from the other verbs.
Example: I can ask, “Why are you running?” and this is correct but I can’t say, “Why are you hurrying?” As far as I know the latter is not correct. One would ask, “Why are you in a hurry?”.
Why is this verb different from the other verbs?
How can I learn to use it properly? Thanks
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As you know, many English words can be used as both a noun and a verb. However, most English words are used either as a verb or as a noun. For example, the word “hurry” is much more often used as a noun than as a verb. The phrase ‘in a hurry’ is a ‘strong collocation’, which means that it has been used in the past by many generations of native speakers, most of whom do not ask why this phrase was used so often, because that would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain. In German, we have a verb ‘frieren’ and say “Ich friere”. So we use a strong collocation that contains the verb. In English, the strong collocation is “I’m cold”, which contains no action verb, only the ‘be-verb’ and an adjective. No one can explain why this is the case.
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“What’s the hurry?” would be more common, but there is nothing wrong with saying “Why are you hurrying?”.
@Torsten A lot of those sample sentences are pretty sad.
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What do you mean by “pretty sad”? Do you mean poor quality or sad as the opposite of happy?
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“Hurry up!”
“I am hurrying!” would be a very common response.
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I don’t think the word ‘hurry’ is a verb of perception. So, there is nothing wrong with using it in the progressive form as in: Why are you hurrying?
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Poor quality. It’s full of bad usage, lots of typos, and some things that don’t even make sense.
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Here’s the situation. When you want to learn a new word, you need a lot of examples that show how the word can be used in context. So I instructed our developers to extract all the sentences written by native speakers on our forum and create a searchable database of those sentences. What I didn’t expect was that through the extraction process, the developers could retrieve not only the sentences written by native speakers, but also the sentences posted by our learners. (That’s all the sentences that the native speakers responded to using the quote function in the forum.) So we have more than 200,000 sentences, many of which need to be changed, and I’m now thinking about adding a feature that allows users to edit, correct and translate sentences, similar to what Tatoeba.org offers. What is your opinion on this?
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I could not get connected to the website, Torsten.
What I see on my browser is this: Hmmm… can’t reach this page.
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This happened because I made a typo in the URL, which I have now corrected, and you can try again.
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Yes, successful.
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Checking and correctly 200K sentences is overwhelming. Opening it up for editing will barely make a dent.
It seems like whatever automation is being used created more work than it saved.
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