Verb aspect: which learning technique?

[Daniele]

Which learning technique do you use to learn imperfective-perfective verb pairs (for example in a slavic language)?
Do you learn the pairs by heart first? Do you solely rely on passive exposure?

(I didn't find any old topic about this but I might have missed it)

Daniele

[chove]

I've mean meaning to ask if there's any guessable pattern to these pairs in Polish or do I have to just memorise them all?

[smallwhite]

Which learning technique do you use to learn imperfective-perfective verb pairs (for example in a slavic language)?
Do you learn the pairs by heart first? Do you solely rely on passive exposure?

Not imperfective-perfective but just conjugations in general:
I try to cram them all early on, without worrying whether I really remember much, just to make each word become familiar - familiar to decode when I later hear it, familiar to pronounce when I later see it.

Actually I just wanted to respond to your profile pic - at first glance I thought it was an OMG face with an open mouth with only 1 tooth, and I thought, "What an ugly face!". Then I realised it was actually a dog, and I thought, "What a beautiful dog!"

And the spooky halloween dog summoned the spooky black cat.

[Radioclare]

When I was first learning Croatian I just tried to memorise the aspect when I was learning each verb, in the same way I might have tried to memorise gender of nouns in another language.

I found it a bit frustrating that some textbooks introduced a lot of verbs in vocabulary lists before they explained about aspect, so I had to go back and try to learn the aspect of those verbs separately afterwards.

Over time I got my head round the patterns a bit more and developed a better feel for which verb is which. I still make plenty of mistakes though!

[lusan]

Which learning technique do you use to learn imperfective-perfective verb pairs (for example in a slavic language)?
Do you learn the pairs by heart first? Do you solely rely on passive exposure?

(I didn't find any old topic about this but I might have missed it)

Daniele

For Polish I made an Anki Deck of most common one:

Front side: Imperfective
Backside: Perfective

Of course, this assumes that I know their meanings for the imperfectives, otherwise the cards would be too complicated.

[Iversen]

Russian was my first Slavic language, and luckily my preferred Russian-Danish dictionary (from Gyldendal) always shows aspect pairs of verbs, so when I have made Russian wordlists I could always include both the imperfective and the perfective item. With time this has given me a fair amount of training in recognizing the two kinds of verbs - albeit with the reservation that this works best with infinitives in my brain because dictionaries quote infinitives rather than the other forms - but working with wordpairs like this is still a useful training.

However not all dictionaries are like that. I have a French<>Polish one which apparently was made for Polish learners of French, and I use it a lot to look words up because it is handy - but it takes aspect very casually, and that's a problem. Fortunately I also have a fat green German<>Polish one from Pons, and it contains the necessary information, but is almost too heavy to be practical.

OK, not all do wordlists when they study (some do Anki instead or nothing), but I have a hard time to see how you can learn about aspects solely from raw input. Remember that first you have to find out whether a given verb is imperfective or perfective from the context, and this can be gleaned from the grammatical context and some semantic reasoning if you already know the language - and knowing which verbs are perfective/imperfective is one of the things ... oh no, now things run in circles...

Instead I would propose that you collect rules of thumb, and this involves looking at the relevant chapter in a decent grammar and then you have to find a dictionary that shows aspect pairs - it is not enough to be told that this verb is perfective and that one in imperfective - to absorb the rules you have to see the verbs in pairs. For instance my Pons says that "pić" (to drink) is imperfective, and that it has an perfective counterpart that begins with the prefix "wy-". So here is already a rule of thumb: most simple verbs are imperfective, and you have to learn those by heart that aren't. Then you can make them perfective by adding prefixes, and there is often a vague semantic reason for choosing one or the other. For instance fluids tend to disappear when you drink them so it is not an accident that "wy-" is used here, but you can never be sure so you have to memorize the relevant prefix (or prefixes) for each root.

If we look at the other end of the verbs then the simple rule is that the more 'stuffing', the more likely the verb is to be imperfective. Actually some perfectivized verbs have developed imperfective counterparts by adding stuff to the second half - like "pić" (be drinking) -> "wypić" (do the drinking) --> "wypijać" (drink up). However some of the inserts are only really conspicuous in the infinitive, like the infix "-ow-" in "-ować" which becomes "-uje-" in the present forms. It is also likely that a verb ending in "-ać" is imperfective, while one in in "-ić" is perfective, but you can never be totally sure about this rule - I just mentioned an exception with "pić".

Your grammar will give you some hints like this, but you need to find a dictionary where you can see the exact situation for each new word you look up, and then you have to stay alert to aspect while you study texts.

And no, I'm not an expert in Polish, but I have just used the techniques mentioned above in half a dozen Slavic languages by now, and I would never have gotten anywhere if I had had to reinvent the wheel for each new language. It is the same system that runs across all the Slavic languages, and once you have learnt the workings in one language you can easily recognize the patterns in your next conquest.

[risbolle]

First of all, I'm a total layman, so the following is probably not worth much. It's also russian-centric (though at least two or three other Slavic languages would look quite similar in this respect).

To add to Iversen's response, I too believe that the key to knowing whether a verb is perfective or imperfective is mostly in word morphology, and specifically in recognising (preferably automatically) certain patterns.

Here's a thought experiment: a new Russian word: вентиклюжить (ventikliuzhit'). I've just made it up - it doesn't exist (well I hope not); it sounds very silly but inoffensive, I promise. Now, I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find a native russian speaker who would get its [im]perfectiveness incorrectly (it's imperfective, of course).

Similarly, the following would be universally accepted as perfective, all without having the faintest about their meaning:
отвентиклюжить (otventikliuzhit').
вентиклюжнуть (ventikliuzhnut').