Verbs of motion
11 March 2026 01:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI have spent what feels like a week (certainly multiple days) in trying to memorise the Russian verbs of motion, going so far as to write them out and carry them around with me to study in spare moments, and when I finally ventured on the exercises at the end of the chapter I still managed to get almost 50% of them wrong -- just as often via simply mistaking the (irregular) verb form as via picking the wrong version of the verb! I seem to remember that I never really mastered verbs of motion the first time round -- I do remember opting to be demoted to a lower class during my study course in Moscow specifically because I couldn't handle the verbs of motion questions in the initial assessment exam, which meant that I spent the entire course doing very elementary exercises and learnt nothing to speak of :-p
Our Russian teacher advised us simply to make sure we always put prefixes on any verbs of motion in order to convert them to standard perfective/imperfective pairs rather than the specialised general motion/specific motion pairs... but then I never really grasped what the difference between specific motion (a single defined one-way journey) and a perfective verb (a completed action as versus an ongoing one... so far as I remember; I haven't reached that section of the grammar yet) was in the first place....
It does strike me that it is an extremely 1960s approach to present the student with a list of twelve fairly irregular verbs (only ten of which are actually written out, so it turned out I hadn't learnt the other two when it came to the exercises) and expect him to simply sit down and memorise by rote the entire present tense, past tense, and imperatives for each! I suspect the modern teach-yourself textbooks take a much more laid-back approach... well, we shall see how the 1990s book introduces the subject when it arrives in that course. (I am on Lesson 11 of the former and Lesson 7 of the latter... except that the latter has introduced four noun cases already and the former has only just brought up the accusative case -- just about possible in Russian since the accusative only really varies for feminine nouns, so you can presumably put off introducing the subject for some time by a careful choice of vocabulary!)
The advantage of having two courses running at the same time is that it gives me more practice texts and exercises, and offers two bites at the cherry where all the grammatical concepts are concerned, so I get to revise concepts that I have supposedly already learned in the other book. And it gives me two different sets of 'elementary' vocabulary, although in both cases it tends to be a pretty arbitrary set governed by the subject of the lesson, rather than the most common words in the language. (We have already had words like 'toadstool', 'marble' and 'sculptor', 'bay', 'pen-holder' and 'nib' -- presumably rather more useful in the 1960s! -- and of course the infamous 'representative of the Ministry of Trade', a Soviet 1960s phrase which amused and delighted me by actually coming in useful in its various component parts immediately after I'd dutifully learnt it, e.g. 'trade', торговля, comes up in Smok and Malish :-)
The trouble with verbs of motion is that they deal with concepts that English doesn't even consider significant, let alone important enough to represent some of the most common verbs in the language. We can't even translate the idea of 'conveying a person or thing somewhere not by means of a vehicle', let alone differentiate between doing so on a single defined occasion and doing so in a generalised unfocused sort of way -- and we certainly don't see it as a fundamental action requiring its own dedicated verb in multiple forms. So you've got the basic problem of understanding the fine distinctions of meaning being made, which is then stacked on top of the grammatical problem of another type of distinction that English doesn't recognise. It makes sense, even if the English language doesn't do it, that Russian opts to differentiate between travelling under your own steam and being carried along by a horse or other conveyance (the vocabulary obviously massively pre-dates the motor-cars and trains to which it is nowadays chiefly applied!), but the fact that it also distinguishes between conveying *other people* along with you by different modes of transport complicates matters further, even before you hit the whole question of direction.
And then there is pronunciation. Even if you can write them out correctly, the stress shifts between the first and second syllable in different forms of the verb, which drastically changes the vowel sound between, say, the first and second person or the present and past tense or the masculine and feminine...
This is one element that I really might have hoped that I could have internalised painlessly by means of simply listening to vast amounts of spoken Russian over the past year, even if details like individual case-endings (especially the feminine ones, which are all rather similar) didn't stick, but apparently mere exposure isn't enough to drive the concept in :-(
I did, however, acquire the knowledge along the way that the Russian for riding a horse is simply to travel 'on high' (верхом), as opposed to travelling 'on skates' or 'on skis' or 'on a boat', all of which use the same verb meaning basically 'to roll along' -- and which is not, so far as I know, counted as a 'verb of motion'!
So far I have made it to Chapter 15 -- 4:26 hours out of 9:30 -- in my Smekhov-narrated "Three Musketeers" audiobook, although admittedly I tend to predictably fall asleep within the first ten minutes or so every night (or at least realise that I have mentally 'tuned out' and haven't understood a word of what has just been said, and get up to turn it off). "Brave New World" to the contrary, having mellifluous Russian administered to my sleeping ear doesn't seem to result in any subconscious acquisition of knowledge :-p
(And to be fair, some of the recent chapters do appear to have been very much shorter than the others!)
Our Russian teacher advised us simply to make sure we always put prefixes on any verbs of motion in order to convert them to standard perfective/imperfective pairs rather than the specialised general motion/specific motion pairs... but then I never really grasped what the difference between specific motion (a single defined one-way journey) and a perfective verb (a completed action as versus an ongoing one... so far as I remember; I haven't reached that section of the grammar yet) was in the first place....
It does strike me that it is an extremely 1960s approach to present the student with a list of twelve fairly irregular verbs (only ten of which are actually written out, so it turned out I hadn't learnt the other two when it came to the exercises) and expect him to simply sit down and memorise by rote the entire present tense, past tense, and imperatives for each! I suspect the modern teach-yourself textbooks take a much more laid-back approach... well, we shall see how the 1990s book introduces the subject when it arrives in that course. (I am on Lesson 11 of the former and Lesson 7 of the latter... except that the latter has introduced four noun cases already and the former has only just brought up the accusative case -- just about possible in Russian since the accusative only really varies for feminine nouns, so you can presumably put off introducing the subject for some time by a careful choice of vocabulary!)
The advantage of having two courses running at the same time is that it gives me more practice texts and exercises, and offers two bites at the cherry where all the grammatical concepts are concerned, so I get to revise concepts that I have supposedly already learned in the other book. And it gives me two different sets of 'elementary' vocabulary, although in both cases it tends to be a pretty arbitrary set governed by the subject of the lesson, rather than the most common words in the language. (We have already had words like 'toadstool', 'marble' and 'sculptor', 'bay', 'pen-holder' and 'nib' -- presumably rather more useful in the 1960s! -- and of course the infamous 'representative of the Ministry of Trade', a Soviet 1960s phrase which amused and delighted me by actually coming in useful in its various component parts immediately after I'd dutifully learnt it, e.g. 'trade', торговля, comes up in Smok and Malish :-)
The trouble with verbs of motion is that they deal with concepts that English doesn't even consider significant, let alone important enough to represent some of the most common verbs in the language. We can't even translate the idea of 'conveying a person or thing somewhere not by means of a vehicle', let alone differentiate between doing so on a single defined occasion and doing so in a generalised unfocused sort of way -- and we certainly don't see it as a fundamental action requiring its own dedicated verb in multiple forms. So you've got the basic problem of understanding the fine distinctions of meaning being made, which is then stacked on top of the grammatical problem of another type of distinction that English doesn't recognise. It makes sense, even if the English language doesn't do it, that Russian opts to differentiate between travelling under your own steam and being carried along by a horse or other conveyance (the vocabulary obviously massively pre-dates the motor-cars and trains to which it is nowadays chiefly applied!), but the fact that it also distinguishes between conveying *other people* along with you by different modes of transport complicates matters further, even before you hit the whole question of direction.
And then there is pronunciation. Even if you can write them out correctly, the stress shifts between the first and second syllable in different forms of the verb, which drastically changes the vowel sound between, say, the first and second person or the present and past tense or the masculine and feminine...
This is one element that I really might have hoped that I could have internalised painlessly by means of simply listening to vast amounts of spoken Russian over the past year, even if details like individual case-endings (especially the feminine ones, which are all rather similar) didn't stick, but apparently mere exposure isn't enough to drive the concept in :-(
I did, however, acquire the knowledge along the way that the Russian for riding a horse is simply to travel 'on high' (верхом), as opposed to travelling 'on skates' or 'on skis' or 'on a boat', all of which use the same verb meaning basically 'to roll along' -- and which is not, so far as I know, counted as a 'verb of motion'!
So far I have made it to Chapter 15 -- 4:26 hours out of 9:30 -- in my Smekhov-narrated "Three Musketeers" audiobook, although admittedly I tend to predictably fall asleep within the first ten minutes or so every night (or at least realise that I have mentally 'tuned out' and haven't understood a word of what has just been said, and get up to turn it off). "Brave New World" to the contrary, having mellifluous Russian administered to my sleeping ear doesn't seem to result in any subconscious acquisition of knowledge :-p
(And to be fair, some of the recent chapters do appear to have been very much shorter than the others!)