Hi everyone, I'm Max from Russia! I'm learnin english and some times there is so stupid thing in the language for my russian mind. There is about 5 tenses in russian as against about 16 in english. WHY? Russians hate english tenses system. But ok, you can understand in the end the difference between times, even if it's unusual in russian. But the most strange thing in english (not only in english, but almost every european language exept slavic languages and latin, as i know) is an article. What is it? We have no article in russian so it's impossible to understand why we have to use the word before other words. Ok, i understand, that we use an article in the sentance "I am a/an Y", but as I understand there is no logic, no key in the usage of articles, we just have to memorize the list of sentences and cases.
What is your detest part of english grammar?
Hi Maxim
Re Articles, in English is someone has 1 car we would say 'he has a car' .....so in this sense the loose rule is 'a' = 'one'
Re Slavic languages, would they just say in eg Russian ' He has car'
There of course other subtleties with articles like the two following sentences.
'Get in the car! ' There may be 100s of cars but you have to get into a SPECIFIC CAR.
'Get in a car! ' Here it just means get into ANY car out of the 100 parked in front of you.
Hope that helps a little.Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.
Kind regards
Ryder
Each language has its own structure and style.
After extensive exposure to a language (books, movies, conversations), learners absorb the language: grammatical structures, vocabulary, and style.
Some learners fight this process. The ones who embrace this process generally become very good.
Maxim
I don’t understand you question about there being „5 times in Russian against 16 in English.“ What are you talking about?
And you have to use articles in English. That’s just the way it is. If you want to learn a foreign language don’t fight mentally why the language is different. There’s no answer. You just have to accept it and move on, otherwise you just won’t learn it.
Valery,
There are perfect and imperfect forms in russian, which can be compared with english tenses. A past tense verb can be perfect (я сделал) and imperfect (я делал), like english I did and I was doing. But there is only imperfect present tense in russian, like english present continious (я делаю). If we add perfect prefex "c-" to present form "делаю", it became perfect future time "сделаю". And also there is a imperfect future form (я буду делать). so 3 tenses (past, present and furure) x 2 forms (imperfect and perfect) - perfect present = 5 tenses.
Maxim,
I am native Russian speaker. I never heard about 5 times in Russian. There are only 3: Present, Past and Future. You need to accept that English completely different.
