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Most verbs distinguish between the imperfect and perfect aspect (писать/написать), but with verbs of motion the imperfect verbs distinguish between undirected and directed motion (плавать/плыть).
With писать I can distinguish between:
How do I make a similar distinction between
I think, a lot of confusion might arise depending on the context of such sentences, because you also need to know WHY you use perfective or imperfective for a particular statement.
The core difference is that "writing" is often perceived as an action leading to a natural result of something being written. Do "walking", "swimming", "carrying" have any natural result? They don't—at least, there are many important situations where they do not seem to. On the other hand, such activities may have a beginning and an ending, which serves as a suitable "limitation" that a perfective verb needs.
If the action has a particular result, of course, use a perfective that states the desired outcome. The major problem is, you have to choose aspect even when it is not that easy to find a measurable result.
Use imperfective verbs. For verbs of motion, use imperfective multidirectional verbs. If one repeated link of a repeated trip is specifically decribed, one-way verb can also be used.
Use imperfectives. For verbs of motion, use one-way verb for motion with a goal and multi-directional verb for a complicated motion that is not directed anywhere in particular:
Use perfectives. If your action reaches some "result", you should obviously use the perfective you need. However, some activities ("sleep", "have a walk") do not have any particular result. Russian often has по-prefixed perfective verbs for them, so that you can describe "doing that action for some time" and arrange them in a sequence:
по-prefixed perfectives formed from one-way verbs of motion mean the onset of an action.
по-prefixed perfectives formed from multidirectional verbs of motion mean doing action for some time. Note that "походить" is not the default "walking around" verb—you may use it, but you can use "погулять" just as well.
Now, rather than recalling "stories" from the past you make a random reference to a past action. It is important that it happened at all, but the exact moment is irrelevant to your message.
Use imperfective verbs. For verbs of motion, use multidirectional verbs.
Note that imperfective verbs may have a logical consequence that overlaps with the "result":
It is easier with verbs of motion. At least, after visiting some place you always have to return "home", so you'd want a multidirectional verb. With other verbs it remains an important point of confusion for learners.
This is pretty obvious, but still: use imperfectives and multidirectional verbs (for round trips or aimless motion) to describe actions that "fill" some time frame in question. This is the case when you answer the questions about what you were busy with.
A prefix, usually по-, should be added to the undirected motion verb to make it perfective: плавать - поплавать, летатать - полетать, кататься - покататься, etc. So, your last sentence should be
Я поплавал в реке вчера.
be- does in fact have a distinct set of meanings.)
Apr 22, 2015 at 7:44
be- that it has no particular meaning.
Apr 22, 2015 at 9:37
Note that here Russian is very much like English. "Я плавал" - "I swam"; "Я поплавал" - "I have swum". And as in English people tend to say "Я плавал"/"I swam" more often even when "I have swum" is OK too.
You can solve the problem by yourself, try the ruscorpora.ru
Let us suppose that our aim is to find something across all Russian morphological forms for the verb плавать. For many verbs, the perfective is inflected exactly like its imperfective partner, but with a prepositional prefix про-, по-, раз-, etc. So we put in the Lexico-grammatical search form *плавать. From the 'Gramm. features' we shall select 'past, perfective'. (help)
The response to the query contains the following:
Поплавав
проплавала
поплавал
сплавал
отплавала
...
By specifying our query with the second word Я, we build the construction
WORD1 [distance between words] WORD2, where WORD1=Я, WORD2=*плавать.
