- Listen to the song and rejoice.
- The officer listened to the request of the farmers.
- He is still in the hang-over of the music he listened to yesterday.
- I was bored by listening to her story.
- Honourable audience, please listen to me!
- Boys do not listen to us when they come of age.
- This boy is very obstinate. He does not listen to anything.
- It is better to see in person rather than listen to others’ talk.
- The chief minister listened to the appeals of the public.
- We can understand why he is popular when we listen to the prime minster speaking.
- The baby went to sleep listening to his mother’s affectionate lullaby.
Above all sentences have "listen+to" and I have heard "listen+to" is the intransitive verb. All the above sentences are translated into our language (Kannada) then it becomes "transitive verb" with meaningful and correct sentences. If those sentences are translated as "intransitive verbs" then all sentences are incorrect and we get meaningless sentences. Here is my doubt. If the thought is same (in both native and non native speakers mind) then why these sentences differs from one another?
Best Answer
In English we say that we listen to something; in some other languages you can just "listen something", using a verb similar to "listen" transitively without a preposition. Why is this any great surprise, though? Some languages have articles, some don't. Some generally put attributive adjectives before the nouns, others after, others vary. Some have fairly free word order, some fairly fixed word order. Some have grammatical gender and complex case systems. Some have tense, some don't. Languages can't all be expected to represent the same thoughts in exactly parallel ways.