One of the followers of the video content on YouTube, Dennis, wrote asking about the question of aspects. I answered as I could and also as you will see got his permission to share the conversation so that more language learners would be able to take advantage of the topic.
-
Conversation started Thursday
-
Dear David,
Thank you so much of the add. I’m honored!
I’m a very big fan of your youtube videos concerning the Russian language. I use them in addition of my Russian language course and I ust say that they give me a headstart of the rest. So they really help!
I was wondering however if you could tell me which video talks about the time aspect ( поличать vs поличить) if you know what I mean with that. We talked about it yesterday in class and most people (including myself) find it very difficult.I hope you can help me out with this one.
Thank you so much in advance!
Dennis Meurders
- Thursday
-
There is a bit about that but I can’t remember which one. Basically think about the difference between speak and say. A person can speak for a long time without saying anything. Replace the idea of talking instead of the action in question, and whether speak or say fits the case better will tell you which aspect it is.
So which of speak and say would be perfective and which imperfective?
-
Friday
-
Since speaking implies the present and is therefore not finished, I think that ‘speaking’ refers to the imperfective. To say one thing, one must finish the action, so ‘say’ is the perfective?
- Friday
-
That’s right. And “tell” is even more perfective. However, in English we can be far more subtle as we can say “he was telling me” which implies he didn’t get to the end of it. In Slavonic you would use the other aspectival pair or you might on occasion make an imperfective from a perfective by using the iterative suffix.
-
Today
-
And now the question remaines: how to apply it in Russian. But that would be a matter of practice… I will ask my wife to help me out here. She’s Belorussian and Russian is her native language. What other advice can you give in order to speed up the learning process? I’m a little bit impatient. The sooner I learn Russian, the better it is for me
-
I advise you to bear it in mind, but not fret over it unduly, as Russian speakers will soon work out that you are making aspectival mistakes (as all foreigners do) and usually they’ll correct the aspect in their minds and not even correct you in speech. When you then write something down, they’ll show you which aspects you got wrong, and you might be surprised at how well they understood with wrong aspects! It’s a bit like how we get used to Russians not saying a or the properly – we fit the right one in mentally as we listen to them.
-
Can I blog this small conversation as many more would benefit from your excellent line of questions?
-
of course! not a problem at all
-
Many thanks.
-
if it helps to improve other learners’ their progress, by all means, you should
-
I hope it will. People do tend to have a mental blockage about aspects. A good friend who is English but lives here and learned Polish well is still convinced that there is no such thing as aspect, only verbal tenses. I tried to explain it but he still tries to fit the Slavic system into a tense system in his mind, and yet his Polish is perfectly functional.
-
That’s funny. When I mentioned it to my wife, initially, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to clarify what I meant with examples from my textbook
btw where can I find you blog?
-
www.huliganov.tv. Please subscribe. I also have a business one – quoracy.com
Related articles
- Challenges of teaching Russian (indrus.in)
- Why is English so difficult to catch on??? (akmalrauza.wordpress.com)
- Accent Reduction and Business English Publisher Language Success Press Releases New iPad App for English Language Learners and ESL Teachers Around the World (prweb.com)
- Official: Most Azerbaijani migrants know Russian language and have no problems (en.trend.az)