Learn English – Does this sentence “How long does it take you to watch TV” make any sense

grammarmeaningsentence-meaning

We often say "How long does it take you to travel from Melbourne to Sydney by train?", we know the beginning & the end.

But what if we say "How long does it take you to watch TV?". It doesn't have the beginning & the end.

Also, can we say:

How long does it take you to wash dishes?

How long does it take you to play chess?…

I knew 1 textbook say "How long does it take you to cook dinner?"

So, do you native often say "How long does it take you to watch TV?"

Note:

I have not problem with dummy "it". That was the typo error. My problem is that can we use that structure for phrases like "wash dishes", "play chess", "watch TV", etc which don't have a clear beginning & the end as "go from 1 place to another"

Best Answer

The structure "How long does it take [for you] to....?" implies a task with some start state and finished state. The question asks about the time required to move from the beginning state to the end state.

How long does it take [you] to...

  • wash the dishes?

    • Start: pile of dirty dishes
    • Finished: clean dishes

  • cook dinner?

    • Start: raw ingredients
    • Finished: a meal, ready to eat

  • play chess?

    • Start: chess pieces in initial start position
    • Finished: one player in checkmate (or stalemate)

  • travel from Melbourne to Sydney?

    • Start: you're in Melbourne
    • Finished: you're in Sydney

In these cases, we have different states, and it take some amount of time to move between them. For some people (or for some modes of transportation, or different cities), the task may take a short time, and for others it may take a long time.

In the case of watching TV, this question doesn't make sense because the "amount of time it takes to watch TV" is always the amount of time you choose to spend watching TV.

  • Start: you're not watching TV yet
  • Finished: you have watched TV for [X] hours -- obviously this "takes" as many hours as you just spent watching T.V.

It can't take someone more or less than an hour to watch an hour of television (versus cooking: it can take someone viable time to make a meal).

If you want to ask how long someone spends watching TV, ask one of these questions:

How long do you spend watching TV each day?

How much TV do you watch each day?

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