It takes ten minutes to the school.

Dear native English speakers,
I have a question. One of my students wrote
1a) It takes ten minutes to the school by walking.

I don't think it is correct.
How would you say it instead? How about these?
1b) It takes ten minutes to walk to the school.
1c) It is a ten-minute walk to the school.
1d) It is ten minutes to the school on foot.
1e) The school is a ten-minute walk.

Thanks in advance.

Hirashin

The most natural sounding ways to say that would be 1b or 1c. D is still correct but a little awkward in my opinion. E is not correct - if you are using the copula (to be) you cannot equate two unequal things. The school cannot literally be a ten minute walk. You would need to change the subject to "it" like the earlier examples so that "it" can have an antecedent of 'the distance' or something similar. Or you could add a prepositional phrase to the end such as 'away' - "the school is a ten minute walk away"

I agree with Serelonde, especially about how to fix E.
Also, I don't think your student's sentence is wrong, just... awkward. Certainly unnatural but I can't think of a reason it would be ungrammatical.

I wouldn't use the hyphen in C (or any of them).

Also, while the sentences (except E) are correct they feel like textbook examples. We would almost never say 'The school is a ten minute walk away.'
We might say,
School is a ten minute walk away. (usually understood to mean 'my school', or 'my child's school', depending on context; possibly an arbitrary subject's school in a longer context.)
My school is a ten minute walk away.
The high school is a ten minute walk away.

There are probably contexts where we would say 'the school'... perhaps if it were the only school in town for example. Also possibly if the school rather than the walker is the topic of the conversation.

You might also say,
My school is a ten minute walk from here.
My school is a ten minute walk from home.

These are less ambiguous and pretty natural. For some reason I feel like b/c/d don't need that disambiguation, the natural assumption in most contexts will be that it is the walk from home to school.

No the student sentence is grammatically incorrect, not just awkward. The correct version would be "it takes ten minutes to walk to school"

Thanks for your help, Serelonde and Chris.

How about these?
1f) It's ten minutes' walk to the school.
1g) It's a ten minutes' walk to the school.

hirashin said:

Thanks for your help, Serelonde and Chris.

How about these?
1f) It's ten minutes' walk to the school.
1g) It's a ten minutes' walk to the school.

Click to expand...

Apostraphy at the end like that is only for posessive plural (genative plural) and when you are using the time as a modifier (modifying the walk) you keep the unit singular -
"Something takes five minutes"
But
"Something is a five minute walk away"