絮言.狂想 #003

The Cantonese podcast for fans of linguistics, language lovers, and Cantonese learners. This language is a language-guessing game, like the Great Language Game, where two of our hosts guess Japanese, Korean, French, German, European Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Polish. They explain their deductive process using phonological features.

Show notes and links available on the Cantonese page. Transcript below.

This podcast is also available on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe!

[Intro]

靳:深喉音啦,我哋啱啱講完內爆音,依家又講深喉音啦,係咪?

以:喂,咪玩嘢啊你,我笑點好低㗎

三:呢個……呢個節目係……合家歡節目嚟㗎呢個,係

[jingle]

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Verb aspects are a thing that annoys many learners of Russian, Polish etc. Most learning resources just told me the basics of what they mean, but not how they function in practice.

This is a series where I, as an intermediate Polish learner, attempt to explain some grammatical features common to most Slavic languages in a simple, jargon-free and applicable way. I will be using Polish as my examples but I hope my notes will help learners of other languages too.

The perfective and imperfective verb-pairs took me a long time to figure out, but here’s what they are, in a nutshell:

The perfective aspect of verbs mean one thing: the thing is DONE. FINISHED. ONE ACTION.

The imperfective aspect of verbs can have two meanings:
1. the PROCESS of the action. Starting to do it, but not finishing it yet.
2. doing a thing REPEATEDLY.

Taking Polish as an example: zrobić – to have done; robić – to be in the process of doing OR to do repeatedly, regularly.

Now when to use which is something you need to get a feel for, but I’ll list some general principles I discovered. (I’ll be leaving the formation of the verb forms for another post.)

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