Teacher Discussion Forums

A couple of teachers in the employment forum recently complained that they had great difficulty teaching Russian students the past perfect tense. My interest was raised when one teacher said that the problem is Russian only has only past tense. So I started looking in to it...

It turns out that Russian does only have one past tense but has two aspects used to describe the past: the perfective and imperfective. The perfective aspect is used when the action is completed, whereas the imperfective is used when the action wasn't completed or the action was repeated a number of times. Seems straightforward to me. But the question remains: how do Russians express a past action that happened before another past action, i.e. the English past perfect tense?

Iain

I think, Russian perfective and imperfective tenses can correspond to English present perfect and past continuous respectively. For example, ya zdielal svayi damashniye zadaniya is the same as I have done my homework, while ya dielal svoyi damashniye zadaniya could correspond to either I was doing my homework or I was attempting to do my homework. Concerning the past perfect, I think Russians would use the same perfective tense and add the modifier of time: k tamu vriemeni, ya uzhe zdielal svayi damashniye zadaniya, which meansI had already finished my homework by that time. Note, though, that I am not a native speaker of Russian. I am just a near-native "hearer" of it . If there are some real native Russian speakers in this forum, they could correct me if i'm wrong.

Thanks, Vytenis. I think you're our Russian expert!

I was guessing that's how Russian worked. A student once pointed out to me that we don't always have to use the past perfect in English to establish a past context. e.g.

While I was doing my homework the bell rang
When the bell rang I was doing my homework

verus

I'd been doing my homework when the bell rang

The only difference I can see between the examples, is that the past perfect has a sense of being more remote (in time) than the first two.

Iain