Imperative in Russian: rule, examples

The verb is one of the most important parts of speech. It serves to describe the action, designate a certain process, that is, without it there will be absolutely nothing, just a meaningless name for a phenomenon that cannot manifest itself in any way, being fixed in a certain state. This nominative part of speech is characterized by constant morphological characters such as appearance, recurrence, transition, and conjugation, while gender, face, number, time, and mood are inconstant. The latter will be discussed in this article. How to determine the mood of a verb in Russian, what does it affect, what is it necessary for? Let's try to understand and, importantly, remember.

What is inclination? General view

In principle, some scientists define the mood as “attitude towards reality”. A rather abstract formulation that does not particularly explain the meaning of this morphological feature is worth confessing. But if you try to figure it out, everything becomes very clear.

There are three inclinations in total . The indicative mood in Russian indicates a real action and is used in all three tenses - it is it that is the most widespread and, therefore, the easiest to remember. Or the most difficult. Its existence in three temporal forms allows you to conjugate verbs in all available ways, because of which you have to memorize a huge number of endings, which is not always so easy.

Imperative in Russian is also quite common. It denotes an order, a request, a certain instruction - any action that a person must perform not of his own free will, but by the will of the interlocutor. Verbs in the imperative mood exist in only two forms, which, of course, simplifies working with them, but at the same time creates certain difficulties for those who are not native speakers of the Russian language and cannot intuitively choose the correct ending.

Conditional mood in the Russian language, it is also called the subjunctive, shows an unrealistic effect, possible under certain conditions. It is called the simplest: only one form, changing only by genus, to which a particle is added - it is not difficult to determine such an element in the text.

Now, when we have a basic idea of ​​what moods are in Russian, examples will help us understand the rule better.

Imperative - for what, how

So, we continue to consider the imperative in the Russian language. As mentioned above, it means, on the basis of the name, a command in any form: an order, a request, a polite order - the semantic hue depends only on intonation, no features in the formation of the form depending on the motive that the speaker puts.

The imperative mood in the Russian language is a rule that has been postponed in our subconscious, we apply it without even thinking. But still, it is necessary to understand why this is so, and not otherwise.

In order to use verbs in the imperative mood, first of all you need to determine who you need to turn to. To address the request to the person to whom the speaker addresses “you,” the corresponding singular form is used. For its formation, you need to take away the ending from the verb in the indicative mood ( read-read-read-read ..., run-run-run-run ..., be-bud-bud-bud ...) and add one of the two vowels ( and or th ) or a soft sign ( read, Run, be ). Fortunately, Russian speakers usually intuitively feel which ending to choose, therefore, putting a verb in the second person of the singular imperative mood usually does not cause difficulties.

If we turn to the person for “you” or want to address our request to a group of people, then “those” ( read, run, be ) are simply added to the singular form of imperative — everything is much simpler than it seems at first glance.

Is it really that easy?

But this is the Russian language - where is it without exception? No one canceled the verbs in which the root vowels and consonants change during conjugation, or even the root completely. For example, " eat-eat-eat, go-go-go-go ." Here, unfortunately, the rule is useless, either intuition or a banal subconscious knowledge of the necessary form will help - otherwise, nothing.

The imperative mood in Russian is the simplest topic, for mastering which it is necessary to be able to form the singular form of the second person of this mood, and if necessary just add a “polite” ending to it.

The use of form exceptions is not so frequent as to be a serious difficulty for native speakers. True, foreigners will have to work hard to understand the imperative mood of the verb.

And a little more features

First, you need to take into account the type of verb: an imperfect form is formed only from verbs of an imperfect type - they answer the question "What to do?" ( open-open-open-open ), while the perfect look, respectively, - only from perfect - with the question "What to do?" ( open-slightly-open-slightly ).

Another interesting thing related to the imperfect form of the verb: the presence of the suffix “va” after the roots “know”, “yes”, “sta” (as in the words KNOW, GIVE, INSERT ). Usually, to form the imperative mood, the verb is put in the first person singular, corresponding to the pronoun “I” (I know, give, I get up ), that is, this suffix disappears, as in all other forms of the verb ( knows, give, you get ). But in the imperative mood, the suffix returns ( Cognize, GIVE, Rise ), you should not forget about it in any case.

And the subjunctive? Education and Application

We pass to the subjunctive conditional mood. Everything is much simpler here than even in the imperative. The peculiarity of using this inclination is that the past tense is used for its formation, changing in accordance with the gender and number of the object of utterance, that is, in order to say about the subject in the singular, we use the singular forms of the past tense ( went, drew ), and if we are talking about a group of people or the one to whom we respectfully refer to “you”, the plural of the same past tense is applied ( indicated, spoken ).

The second component of the subjunctive mood is the particles “by” and “b” - their choice depends on the context and is most often determined by the harmoniousness of the phrase.

That is, when we want to show the possibility of action under any condition, we take the verb in the appropriate form of the past tense and add the necessary particle to it: would say, would go, would laugh.

A little more about the features of use

This form, by the way, is used not only to express action under a certain condition, but also in the case when we want to express dreams, desires ( I would like, I would dream ) and fears, doubts ( would not happen ). Probably it would be more correct to say that all these shades are used equally, therefore the name “conditional mood” used in school textbooks is very arbitrary (a funny pun comes out), it is better to use the term “subjunctive mood”.

And now again and briefly

In principle, the whole theory is stated above according to the simple rule of mood in Russian. The table will help fix it.

Practice, practice, and practice again!

For the final consolidation of the acquired material, try to put the following verbs in different moods.

• In the indicative : to draw, laugh, take, rustle, answer, hate, go out, refuse, set, be proud, tear, order, purr, hope, scratch.
• In the imperative : to go, deny, scream, call, get, dream, reach, turn off, give, blossom, overcook, curse, boast, imagine, realize.
• In the subjunctive : paint, visit, appear, command, destroy, warm, breathe, freeze, buy, ask, reduce, break off, do, congratulate, think.

To summarize

The indicative, subjunctive and imperative moods are one of those basic rules that does not require special memorization and are applied for the most part automatically, according to the sense of language that each of its speakers has. But at the same time, in no case can one deny the need to study at least a basic theory: without knowing the rules, you will never be able to understand certain features of a linguistic phenomenon.

In any case, practice is sometimes a much more effective teacher than a dry theory. A huge plus of this particular case is that we apply this rule every day, so it’s not difficult to assimilate it.