My Slavic Studies

Explanation [first steps]

Мальчик идёт в школу пешком. The child is going to school on foot.

Женщина едет на работу на машине. The woman is going to work by car.

Дети бежат домой. The children are running home.

We’re about to embark on probably the most difficult grammar aspect of the Russian language – verbs of motion! Why is expressing motion in Russian so darn difficult? Because Russians like to be really specific when they express motion. In English we can simply use the verb to go to express just about any type of motion, but sadly Russian likes to be more complex here. They like to specify the direction, the type of transportation used and some other details that we tend to leave out.

I always struggled with these dreaded verbs of motion throughout my Russian studies. I just found them hard to understand. In addition to that, in most textbooks I looked through, these verbs weren’t explained well enough for me to fully comprehend how to use them.

In most of them, the authors would explain some basic uses of the verbs идти – ходить and ехать – ездить [but there is so much more to understand about those verbs], then in later chapters would start using prefixes: проходить – пройти, выезжать – выехать, etc. and I was totally lost. And, to make matters worse, I learned that the verb походить actually existed and I was thinking I’d never master this grammar topic. Eventually all the motion verbs looked the same.

I had to buy several grammar books and ask a lot of questions to native speakers before I was finally able to understand these verbs and use them correctly. I don’t want you to have to go through all of that. It took time and it was too stressful for someone else to have to endure.

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This is an introductory post on the verbs of motion, we’re not going to be learning how any verbs function here, but rather we’ll learn some key things in order to properly understand them and these key things will constantly be repeated in future posts related to them. I hope that by doing so, you’ll fully comprehend how to use these verbs.

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The first key thing to understand is what exactly the verbs of motion are. In Russian, there are 14 verbs of motion. Yes, it wasn’t a typo, there are 14 verbs of motion! Not too bad, I suppose. These verbs express, you guessed it, motion. More specifically, they express going on foot, going by vehicle, running, swimming, flying, etc.

The second key thing to understand is that for each one of these verbs, there is a unidirectional verb [movement in one direction] and a multidirectional verb [movement in many directions]. Neither of these two verbs is perfective, but perfective forms can exist. Since talking about the perfective aspect will only add on to the complexities, we’ll save it for another post.

I’ve made a table below in which all the 14 verbs are listed.

Unidirectional ->	Multidirectional <->	Translation –
идти	ходить	to go [on foot]
ехать	ездить	to go [by vehicle]
плыть	плавать	to swim
лететь	летать	to fly
бежать	бегать	to run
ползти	ползать	to crawl
нести	носить	to take [on foot]
везти	возить	to take [by vehicle]
вести	водить	to guide
катить	катать	to roll
тащить	таскать	to drag
брести	бродить	to wander
гнать	гонять	to lead
лезть	лазить	to climb

The third key thing to understand is that prefixes can be attached to these verbs to add additional meanings. When prefixes are attached, something interesting happens – these verbs now become just like any other verb and only have an imperfective and perfective aspect. We won’t delve into this. As usual, there will be a post for that.

The fourth and final key thing to understand is that the verbs of motion are used very logically. That being said, they will occasionally defy logic and be used in a figurative sense. We’ll address those uses in a yet to be published post.

And thus, we’ve finished our introductory post. Please reread this post again if something didn’t make sense. There will be many grammar posts on this topic to come. Also please be patient as organizing and trying to clearly explain this topic is not easy and I’m taking my time to perfect explanations and examples in posts before they get published on my blog.