participle phrases - During the tour, you will hear interesting stories about the city, learning (?) about its establishment

I wrote a sentence that was considered awkward by fellow translators, on a couple of counts. I'm singling out one particular word they found awkward:

During the tour, you will hear interesting stories about the city, learning about its establishment and history.

Does this "learning" look awkward here?

Would a native speaker use the finite-form "learn" instead? I understand that that would involve adding "and", I just wonder whether the -ing form or the finite form is more felicitous here.

---

(Another question concerning the same sentence)

Answer

We can use the participle clause as you do there to express an incidental or tangential fact.

We will visit the ruins on our tour, fording the stream to reach the dig site.

The problem with your sentence is not grammatical, but semantic, since learning is not an incidental but a direct outcome of hearing stories.

P.S. The participle smooths a somewhat jarring non-sequitur by marking the added fact as tangential/incidental to the finite clause. Consider the statement with a second (non-sequitur) finite clause:

We will visit the ruins on our tour and ford the stream to reach the dig site.

In the OP, a second finite clause would have been better than the participle learning:

During the tour, you will hear interesting stories about the city and learn about its establishment and history.

because the second finite clause follows directly from the first; it is not tangential to it.