Old, dead, or nonexistent?—imperfectives of some verbs

Question

So, often if one digs deep enough one will find that every perfective verb in fact has an imperfective. Except, the problem is these imperfectness seem to be very old or don't exists at all anymore.

My question is, will speakers of russian understand them?

For example let's take the verb жарить:

изжаривать—изжарить

зажаривать—зажарить

Are the imperfectives used at all?—I've found them in dictionaries, but Russians tell me that they don't know of them. Why is this? Are they just very old?

Every perfective verb I've ever learned has one of these imperfective if you look hard enough, which is logical, they should have one. How should I deal with this when I'm learning words?

Answer 1

In the provided example the imperfective forms of the verbs do exist, as confirmed by the dictionary entries. Those words are understood by the people in this forum. Hence the only question is how often they are used. One of the useful tools is Corpus of Russian Language - Charts. You can type a word in a form and look at how usage frequency changed over the last two hundred years. This would be a more objective measure of how the word is used, rather then a personal opinion of an individual.

Ruscorpora shows that the verb "изжаривать" (as oppose to "изжарил") is not referenced by its database. So even though this particular combination of prefix and root is possible and is understood, people do not find much use for it.

The second example "зажаривать" has been used infrequently. By using this form Corpus of Russian Language - Search you can see the snippets of text with examples of how this verb was used.

Answer 2

Let's talk specifically about examples you've provided. Both of these pairs are perfectly valid in Russian and the difference between them is pretty transparent for native speaker. The other thing is that "изжаривать" is used in practice in it reflexive form - "изжариваться" - and indeed is used more rarely (but still used) than other three forms.

So here are examples of word usage:

• "Сколько же можно бесцельно изжариваться на солнце?".
• "Чего ж ты так баклажаны-то изжарил, прямо до угля?"
• "Надо зажарить баклажаны, вот что!"
• "Сначала ты зажариваешь баклажаны на огне, а потом уже, на углях, готовишь мясо".

The closest analogy will be phrasal verbs in English. Some of them are used pretty often, some sound valid but are used rarely. Some are obsolete, some are just wrong.

By the way, a friendly hint, you can just google all these words. It will give you some ideas on their usage. Also, there's a Google's Russian competitor, Yandex, which quite often is a better option for searching Russian words.