Essential Russian Grammar

Brian Kemple

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486273754
• eBook ISBN: 9780486116143
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Designed for adults with limited learning time, this concise and easy-to-use guide enables language students to grasp the fundamentals of Russian quickly and easily. Focusing on the grammar needed to speak and understand the language, the text emphasizes comprehension rather than memorization of grammatical constructions.
Author Brian Kemple uses an efficient and systematic approach to instructing students in the use of all the grammar that's needed for everyday speech and comprehension. Simple phrases are accompanied by clear explanations of parts of speech, use of the comparative and superlative degrees, word order, pronunciation, negation and more. A useful section of practical phrases and a glossary of grammatical terms round out this excellent, inexpensive guide.
Perfect for independent study or as an adjunct to a language course, Essential Russian Grammar is ideal for students, business people, tourists or anyone planning to visit Russia.

VERBS: FORMATION

TENSE AND ASPECT

The Russian verb system has only three tenses: present, past and future. However, Russian has a categorization of verbs that has almost no parallel in English: nearly every Russian verb is of one of two aspects, imperfective or perfective. It takes some time and effort to gain a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which these two aspects are used, but the most basic and important distinction between them is readily understandable:

Imperfective verbs describe actions without reference to the completion of those actions. They may describe an action in general (“Fish swim but people walk”), or an action in progress (“She was reading when I called”), or a repeated or habitual action (“They skate every day”).

Perfective verbs describe actions that have been or will be completed (“She has read the book”; “She will read the book”).

Thus, in Russian, verbs almost always come in pairs, a given verb in English being represented by two verbs in Russian to meet the two aspect requirements. For example, to correspond to the English “to read,” Russian has both the imperfective verb читáть (implying “to read in general, to read habitually, to be reading”) and the perfective verb прочитáть (implying “to read through, to finish reading”). In this case, it is a prefix (про-) that indicates the difference; sometimes it is a change in the stem (different vowel or inserted syllable); sometimes two completely different verbs are used.

THE INFINITIVE

The form in which Russian verbs are entered into dictionaries is the infinitive, corresponding to the English “to stroll,” “to be,” etc. Most verbs have infinitives ending in -ть. In general, the infinitive is used in much the same way as in English:

Я любл гул ть по пáрку.

I love to stroll through the park.

Быть иль не быть, вот в чём вопрóс.

То be or not to be, that is the question. [From Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet.]

THE PRESENT TENSE

Imperfective verbs have three separate tenses: present, past and future. Since the present tense by its nature can never describe a completed action, and completed action is the hallmark of the perfective aspect, perfective verbs have only two separate tenses: past and future. The Russian present tense corresponds to all the different English constructions denoting present time: “he reads,” “he is reading,” “he does read.”

In the present tense, the overwhelming majority of Russian verbs have a different ending for each of the personal pronouns. These endings are added to the stem after dropping the -ть of the infinitive (and often the vowel preceding the -ть). There are two chief sets of these personal endings. In Conjugation I, e is the characteristic vowel of the endings, appearing in the forms for ты, он (or онá or онó), мы and вы. In Conjugation II, the characteristic vowel in the corresponding endings is и. Our model verb for Conjugation I will be the imperfective verb читáть (“to read”); for Conjugation II, the imperfective verb говор

ть (“to speak”):

1. When the verb stem ends in ж...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Suggestions for Vocabulary Building
• List of Abbreviations
• Pronunciation
• Word Order
• How to Form Questions
• Negation
• Nouns
• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Pronouns
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions
• Verbs: Formation
• Verbs: Aspect
• Telling Time
• Useful Expressions
• Appendix I: Special Noun Declensions and Irregular Nouns
• Appendix II: Declension of Numerals
• Appendix III: Declension of Names
• A Glossary of Grammatical Terms
• Index