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Future imperfect like you say ‘i will going’ somewhere. Then future perfect like ‘i will go’. I think this is correct…

The main value of using a case system is that it provides grammatical and semantic precision without needing to rely on word order. While all the inflections of the various cases might be difficult to learn, some may find it easier than truly understanding and applying the rules of word order.

Ok maybe Kupo correct about this one. Im not 100% sure now. I thought imperfect for when you doing something but not finish and then perfect for finished.

@JS and Valentine

Oh gods, you brought up Star Trek’s Chekov, whose accent is literally impossible, because a Russian would never substitute a W for a V, because the W sound DOES NOT EXIST IN RUSSIAN ANYWHERE!! (If anything, it should have been the other way around. He should have been sticking v’s instead of w’s in words, like a German.)

Just as the “ы” vowel does not exist in English anywhere.

Regarding vowels, Russian has five primary vowels and five derived “softened” vowels, so the way it goes is this:

а (“ah”) –> я (“yah”)
э (“eh”) –> е (“yeh”)
о (“oh”) –> ё (“yoh”)
у (“ooh”) –> ю (“yu”)
ы (no English equivalent, but you can try working backwards from its complement if you want to figure out how it sounds) –> и (“eeh”)

There is also “й”, which not everybody agrees is a vowel, and it makes the same sound as “y” in the word “day” — Russian does not have a “w” equivalent, though other Slavic languages do, it looks like this “ў” and sounds like “w” in the word “how”.

For the most part Russian is highly phonetic, so what it looks like is what it sounds like. But this is somewhat thwarted in vowels. The example I like to use is the word “cow” which has the same problem in Russian as in English. The vowel in it is written as “o” but pronounced as “ah” and the same thing happens in the Russian word for cow.

Russian, however, has a handy trick for words where vowels do this. You can alter most Russian words, so that the syllable containing the suspect vowel is stressed, and in Russian whenever stress falls on a syllable, the vowel in that syllable will ALWAYS be pronounced how it is written.

This trick and the general high phoneticism of Russian means that spelling mistakes are extremely infrequent. There is in fact no such verb in Russian as “to spell.” There is a very limited number of words which you cannot change to check the content of the questionable syllable, and you learn the entire list of them in first grade. Spelling mistakes for a native Russian speaker are a sign of EXTREMELY poor education or dyslexia, because it’s almost impossible to make them.

Well Dashapants, i dont know about speaking but I must be honest and say when I learning before now sometimes I putting ‘wery’ for ‘very’ and also W in places where it not need to be. Yes it difficult because it not exist. And maybe Chekov accent not convincing, but he say he try to do bad one by purpose. I see also my other friends when they use english and they not as good like me they also sometimes putting W where it not need to be.

As for spelling on Russian, yes i agree! It very easy and yes sounds like it said. You only person to say this on here i think so far, but I been saying a lot already about this. It easy.

“I will have arrived” – future perfect
I have read that there is no specific “future imperfect” tense in English, though we do have 2 types of “past imperfect”.

Other odd things about English…
Nouns can be verbed, and verbs can be nouned.
Even native speakers of English disagree about how she should be spoken.

And I love Douglas Adams’ take on time travel and verb tenses…

The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveller’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term ‘Future Perfect’ has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

@ dashapants

The most useless words in English from a Russian perspective are the definite and indefinite article

I’ve noticed that a quick and lazy way for actors to be ‘Russian’ is to drop articles.

But now you’ve said that I’m wondering why we need them. The only possible reason is so we can have that exchange in Dr Who:

“You’re a doctor?”

“I’m the Doctor. The definite article so to speak.”

But apart from that it does seem a bit redundant.

@ Alan

Personally, I always wondered how the title of that show is translated into Russian, because you don’t ask “Doctor who?” in Russian. It does not work like that. You kind of can’t ask it like that. So… how can it be translated without losing the whole point of the show?

You can translate it literally, but it’s never used that way as a question in spoken language. The closest vernacular question like that is “what kind of doctor?” but it doesn’t quite have the same sense to it.

So, now that I think about it, the latest companion’s “Doctor what?” is the closest to a translatable Russian equivalent.

@Fransesca : the worse ordeal to me is the one where people are bound and pushed into water. If they float, they are deemed witches and burned at the stack. If they drowned, they were innocents.

Like, WTF ? If you want to kill that poor sap that much, why not directly and painlessly kill him or her ?

@ dashapants

The only relevant thing I can find from a Russian fan site is this;

Доктор Кто

But I’ll leave it to the experts as to whether that really gets the gist.

@ Alan

So they did translate it literally. It does say Doctor Who. But that’s still a problem of how to translate that line in the context of the show, when it is used in dialogue. It doesn’t work as a legit question in Russian.

But oh well, Russian is very forgiving of making up semi-legit words by sticking on extra suffixes and prefixes and whatnot, and it’s pretty forgiving of weird sentence construction too, so it’s probably just used as is.

Though, really, Doctor Which would have been awesome.

@Sir Alan

You’re a braver soul than I.
I get anxiety just eating a sandwich without a full glass of water or juice.

I don’t like eating at restaurants just because I don’t have full control over how much water or soda or juice I have at the ready. If my glass is empty I have to stop eating and wait for my drink to be freshened up.

Obviously, I’ll still eat a restaurant, it’s not crucial to me that my conditions be met, but I generally prefer my own home cooking for this reason.

Also, the thing I ordered from The Internet didn’t come today even though it was supposed to arrive in two days. I am extremely frustrated right now, even though it will probably arrive tomorrow.