Контролная работа

[janetlin]

Just in case studying for my Russian unit test (which is in half an hour) didn't fry my brain enough over the weekend, my Child Development teacher popped a quiz on us today. Gyah! Who cares whether a zygote develops limb buds at 5 weeks or not? I'm trying to cling desperately to the _six_ different verbs Russian has for "to go" (and this is just traveling, not even counting all the other things we use "go" for). I shit you not. Unidirectional, or multi-? By foot, or vehicle? Continuous or habitual, or one-time? elven_alchemist, your language was on crack when it came up with that.

And just to make life fun, there are completely separate verbs for "traveling multi-directional by foot" and "strolling." Can't we just use гулять all the time and forget about ходить and its (way too many) permutations? Ой. You'd think a language that spent most of its life without an alphabet would be _simpler_ than others.

Comments

[janetlin.livejournal.com]

That's so fabulous, about гулять. Yes, it's generally "to cheat on" one's spouse/partner, though there are other idioms like "run around on" and expressions like being a "rover" or having a wandering/roving eye, and roving ~ strolling, so I can see the logic there.

And yes, we do use "go" for a lot of things. But at least it's the same word every time (well, except for the irregular conjugation - why are the most useful verbs all irregular?). And "get" is nasty, too. It has, like, half a page in my dictionary.