Drive and ride

Drive and Ride

Do you drive your bicycle or do you ride it? It is correct to say you ride your bike.

Here are some more examples of things you can ride:

• a horse
• a unicycle
• in a hot air balloon
• on a train
• on a bus
• in a car

and things you can drive:

• a car (if you are steering)
• a tractor (if you are steering)
• a truck (if you are steering)
• a minivan (if you are steering)
• a bus (if you are steering)

It is also very common to say you are going by train or going by car or that you are taking the train or taking your car. In both of these cases, we don’t know if you are riding or driving (though with the train, we can generally assume that you are not driving!)

Here are some other means of transportation that require other verbs.

• You can fly a plane (if you are the pilot).
• You can sail a boat (if you are the captain).

Many activities which require the word drive (fahren) in German have verbs of their own in English, for example: to ski, to rollerblade, to ice-skate, to skateboard, to sled, to roller-skate, to canoe, to kayak, to snowboard.

When we talk about these activities, we often use the gerund (-ing) form, e.g. “I like rollerblading,” “I go sledding a lot in the winter,” “Have you ever been skateboarding?”, etc.