The Prospect of Aspect

Happy was your roving reporter the day he got his passport back--yes, happier even than was Mrs. Bennet the day she rid herself of two daughters, and happier even that the publishers of a certain magazine in which, many oh many a moon ago, backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Happier still was your roving report to hear from his school that his new Letter of Invitation will be ready on the 10th of April--meaning, provided that DHL does its job efficiently, he should be able to have his visa processed and depart for Russia by the end of April.

I cannot say honestly that, overall, I feel much joy or gratitude for what has happened with respect to my passport, Letter of Invitation, and visa. It is hard to feel much gratitude for delay brought on my bureaucratic incompetence. But I am grateful that this additional time before heading off to Moscow is at least giving me more time to work on my Russian. I became even more grateful for more time to study Russian on my own because, on taking another look at my school's website, I realized that Russian lessons will not be free, as I had thought, but merely at a reduced price.

So far, my attempts to teach myself Russian are going well and not so well. I say they are going well because I am in lesson 9 of 20 in my Teach Yourself Russian course and will soon break out of the present tense and into the future and past. But I have not done a very good job and consolidating and retaining vocabulary. To improve my retention, I have finally resorted to making up flash cards that I can go through while watching television.

I have now about as much knowledge as I remember having at the end of my one, abortive semester of Russian in college. On the one hand, having revived this amount of Russian so quickly gives me a certain pride; on the other, I feel a growing trepidation, because I know I will soon have to delve into one of the more difficult aspects of the Russian language, which is, fittingly, called aspect.

Brief descriptions of the Russian tongue often give the impression that aspect is a feature unique to Russian. This is a half-truth; many languages have the ability to make distinctions similar to what is conveyed by aspect in Russian. Briefly, a Russian verb has two forms, called aspects. The first kind of aspect, called imperfective, is used for actions that are habitual, repeated, in progress, or of a general nature. The second kind of aspect, called perfective, is used for actions that are or will be completed. As near as I can tell, perfective aspect is used only in the future and past and has no present-tense form.

English has a litle of this in its use of progressive (am doing, has been doing, will be doing) tenses. Take, for example, the difference in meaning between these two sentences:

Jane has finished her homework.

Jane has been finishing her homework early every day.

The first sentence implies a completed action; we are speaking only of what Jane did today. The second, however, involves a continuing situation. Jane has finished her homework early for several days, is presumably still doing so, and will in all likelihood continue to do so. In Russian, this kind of distinction is made by using different aspects of the verb.

Since I know now I face the prospect of learning aspect fairly soon, I went to the library today and picked up a giant book of Russian verbs. Flipping through it, I got a sense of how complicated aspect will make my life. Every verb in the book is given as a double entry, with the imperfective form of the verb first and the perfective form second. For many, but alas not all, verbs, the perfective is formed by adding a prefix to the imperfective form of the verb. But because many Russian verbs are irregular, you cannot alway determine whether a verb you encounter in its infinitive form is a perfective or imperfective verb.

Aspect also creates vastly different forms of the future and past tenses in Russian. For imperfective verbs, the future tense is always a form of the verb "to be" followed by the infinitive, similar to the "am to/is to" future in English. Perfective verbs, on the other hand, have a future form that looks very similar to the imperfective present.

It's clear that all of this going to take a great deal of time to sort out. I am glad I have a little time to work on it, as I supect my time for Russian studies will initially be rather limited once I get to Moscow.