> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?
Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.
Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".
As a native speaker of Slovenian and a decent speaker of Serb/Croatian this is not true for these particular Slavic languages. I can say "Grem v trgovino" / "Idem u dučan" (I'm going to the store) and it implies nothing at all about whether I'm taking the bus, going on foot or riding a horse for that matter.
There's a kind of default 'to go' verb in all the Slavic languages I know about, but you can't use it in certain contexts. In Polish, for example, you can similarly say:
Idę do sklepu (I'm going to the store)
With no implication about mode of transit. For that matter, you can even say:
Lecę do sklepu (I'm flying to the store), to imply that you're in a hurry.
But you would never say:
Idę do Moskwy (I'm going to Moscow)
Unless you were actually going there on foot. Sometimes the appropriate verb is required.
1. There are separate categories of "to go" in Russian and other Slavic languages for walking on foot, strolling, climbing, running, crawling, flying, going by vehicle, swimming and probably a few more I'm forgetting. The method of locomotion is baked into the verb. You can read some examples here if the nerdery interests you: http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php
2. Each of these verbs comes in a pair. One is unidirectional, the other is multidirectional. The difference in usage is more subtle than these names suggest, but that's the general idea.
3. You have a ton of prefixes you can stick onto these verbs to indicate action into, through, around, to-and-back, and so on.
4. There's other verbs you use if you carried or conveyed something somewhere. Points 2 and 3 apply to them, too.
5. These verbs also have aspect, but you've suffered enough.
So the choice of verb of motion in a sentence like "I took something there" encodes a lot of meaning, and is as intuitive to native speakers as the proper usage of "the" and "a" is to English speakers—you know exactly how to use it correctly, but good luck trying to articulate the rules to yourself or to people learning the language if you haven't gotten special training.
Hm, yeah, that's a lot of context, thanks for the explanation! I imagine it would be hell to translate from Russian to something like English, because you lose all that effortless nuance and have to make it explicit in a way that sounds more forced.
Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.