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Interjection im/perfective Rus - Croatian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6542 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 17 of 19 16 January 2014 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's sort of the official way, but here they are quite intechangeable. The main reason to use two different forms instead of one would be repetition.
Poslushai, yes. Posmotri, not really :/ As I said, it's normally about literally looking at something. Smotri is fine. Slushai is also fine but by default it would convey less irritation than poslushai.
ždat' in the imperfective imperative implies a reallllllly long wait. like in the beautiful, famous poem about waiting for a soldier to come back from the war. "wait for me even when everyone else gives up waiting and declares me dead". this sort of waiting, yeah. or at the very least, it's better translated as keep waiting/continue waiting, ie I don't know how long you'll have to wait. of course any service workers will try to soften this impression ;) (although as a European you're probably used to this hypocrisy :P I hope Medulin and/or ellasevia can clarify whether this applies to Croatian, which is maybe more direct) so in your case it's perfective in both examples. also, podojdi looks like подойди to Russian speakers. (Reminds me how I wrote "jdy" to my mum, meaning I'm waiting for her - the context was that we'd go to have lunch together (this was while travelling). Mum read it as иду and thought I was telling her to wait for me to come where she was.)
"A teper posmotri" is a very natural sentence :) In general both are again interchangeable, and if you really care about the distinction, it's better to use videt' in the first part (a more direct translation of see rather than look), and then the aspect of the second part doesn't matter. Side note about avoiding repetition - as your examples focus on spontaneous reactions, it wouldn't be unnatural to repeat the same word in the same aspect. but in writing it would be avoided, whether you are telling a friend about some episode or especially in fiction, where there are tons of ways of retaining the colloquialism without repetition. Same is probably true about movies. If you have any specific example, feel free to ask whether the other aspect would make sense or not :-)
Your example would (in Russian at least) seem a bit strange and have a meaning along the lines of "can't you look at me at least once while I'm talking to you?" or "can't you spare me even one glance?" This made me think of the fact that the imperative aspect also depends on whether it applies only to the current moment or this sort of situations in general. If you remark that someone's looking OR not looking is impolite, you want them to reconsider their behaviour, not just stop/start looking now. On the other hand, you can also say "ty by xot' posmotrel/a na menä", literally referring only to the current moment, but implying a stronger degree of frustration, and possibly underlining the importance of the current situation. This structure often means something like, okay, I give up, I won't change you, but please make an effort at least now/today. Works with anything you consider unacceptable in general and particularly unacceptable right now :) Edited by Serpent on 16 January 2014 at 11:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6542 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 18 of 19 17 January 2014 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Now that I think of it, an additional issue here is that videt' (to see) has no imperative form. (*видь???????) And the etymological equivalent of the Croatian words we discussed, глядеть/glädet', sounds old-fashioned normally. But I'm too sleepy to figure out what exactly this means with regard to the usage of smotri/posmotri.
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4652 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 19 17 January 2014 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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This is such an interesting thread. It's opening my eyes with regard to Russian grammar
:) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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