walk

[bartholomew]

Hi guys
My first language is not English and I have a little problem:
Which of the two is correct?
The station is a 5 minute walk from my home
or
The station is a 5 minutes walk from my home.

(I know that it is correct to say a 5 storey house, so the above confused me)

[reddog]

The station is a 5 minute walk from my home.

would be the correct sentence.

regards

Reddog

[Mikeyd2]

As in a Five pound note , I suppose as well . But that gets confusing when saying " he gave me 5 pound " or " he gave me 5 pounds " ....Ermmm? Language eh?

[jake-the-peg]

Of course you could drop both the a and the s and say

the station is five minutes walk from my home which would be equally correct

[Quizmonkey]

Erm, what happened to punctuation? Ignore all the above. The following are both correct.

The station is a five-minute walk from my home.
The station is five minutes' walk from my home.

(In English, numbers 1-10 are written as words in text).

[jno]

Quizmonkey is correct; note the hyphen as well as the apostrophe.

[Champagne]

Your quite correct Quizmonkey, but I notice you did change the second sentence, which is not quite what Bartholomew was asking.

Reddog said it best. The first sentence is correct.

[Quizmonkey]

You are wrong Champagne : I corrected the sentence; I didn't 'change' it. . Difficult to entrust a grammar question to one who writes "Your quite correct"...

Once again, Reddog's sentence is NOT correct - read my previous post for reasons.

[THECORBYLOON]

I think you'll find both are incorrect. The station is a good two hours' walk from ma home...

[lankeela]

Way to go THE CORBYLOON!

[Peter Pedant]

Bart - English is quite keen on nouns in apposition. Do you do Latin ? In Latin, these would take the same case

five minute walk, and five storey building are both phrases and the nouns are in apposition.

five minutes' walk = walk of five minutes, and minutes' is a genitive plural, and remember the apostrophe at the end of the word

These are different constructions, same meaning.


what was your question - well you can put one of the other.

One of the English tests I took, asked us to distinguish 'long stem rose' and 'long stemmed rose.' Ans: first phrase doesnt exist. I thought this was quite difficult for non-English speakers.

[Dustybun]

Horlicks anyone?