Imperfective

Perfective

Completable Actions

• Describes an activity without saying whether the activity reached an inherent goal state. Instead, the focus is on the activity itself, such as the following:

• writing a paper – psát esej
• building a house – stavět dům
• vacuuming a rug – luxovat koberec
• cleaning an apartment –

• Describes an activity with an inherent goal state that the activity leads toward. These types of activities ultimately culminate in a completed action:

• I wrote a paper – Napsal(a) jsem esej.
• I built a house – Postavil(a) jsem dům.
• I vacuumed the rug – Vyluxoval(a) jsem koberec.
• I cleaned the apartment – Uklidil(a) jsem byt

Goal-less Activities

• Describe activities that lack an inherent goal state:

• shouting – křičet
• running – běhat
• skiing – lyžovat
• thinking – myslet

• Since these activities lack an inherent goal state, there is no completed act to speak of.
• If they do have a perfective partner, then it typically means to do some limited amount of the activity, e.g. zakřičet ‘to shout (some)’, proběhnout se / zaběhat si – ‘to have a run, go for a run’, however, learning to use these only important once you’ve advanced a bit in Czech.

States

• Describes ongoing states.

• having – mít
• standing – stát
• sitting – sedět
• lying – ležet
• being – být

• States lack an inherent goal state and there is NO PERFECTIVE