Motion Sickness

"They always departed in that school," Willa Cather once wrote about a group of writers of whose work she disapproved. "They never went anywhere."

I think of that quote often, now that I am studying Russian again. I have written a bit before about Russian's infamous verbs of motion. In Russian, you do not simply go anywhere; you walk, ride, fly, or sail, but you do not simply go. But until today, I was not prepared for just how complicated these verbs are going to get.

Verbs of motion are actually a ways away in the Russian course I am currently taking through my school, but the subject of them came up today when I told my teacher, in Russian, that I had gone to the train station to buy tickets for St. Petersburg, and that I was going to St. Petersburg the last weekend in August. My teacher wisely seizedthis opportunity to begin verbs of motion and, after I thanked her, told me we would do more of them in our lesson tomorrow.

Well, here's the score from what I learned today:

1) There is one main verb, Идти ("eed-tee") that refers to motion on foot. When one is going within town, however, Russians don't much care whether the action was on foot or by transport, so it was possible to use this verb for my trip to buy tickets, even though I went to Leningradskiy Station not on foot but by Metro.

2) There is another main verb, Ехать ("eh-khat", similar pronounciation to the Hebrew word for "one") that refers to motion by means of transport, whether a plane, a train, or an automobile (there are also verbs corresponding to the English "to fly" and "to sail", but that's for another time). This is the verb I have to use for my going to St. Petersburg, because one does not walk from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

3) These verbs both refer only to movement one time in one direction. For repeated movement (like one's daily commute), each of these verbs has another corresponding verb.

4) Concepts like arriving, departing, and passing through can be expressed by adding prefixes to the various verbs of motion. In Russian, an airplane does not take off; it leaves by flying.

At first, this all seems quite complicated, but I have come to realize that English also has many different verbs of motion: go, walk, ride, transfer, fly, sail, arrive, depart, and return are just a few of the more common ones. Russian's system also builds on itself and allows for more information to be conveyed succinctly than is possible in English. When we say, My friend went to London, we are saying nothing about whether the friend went there by train, plane, steamer, or kayak. But in Russian, this information can be conveyed with more brevity and less awkwardness.

My teacher has also told me that, when dealing with verbs of motion, it is better to think of them in terms of specific situations rather than abstractly in terms of grammar. I think this is likely to improve my retention of them, and help me avoid a major case of motion sickness.