- Forum >
- Topic: Russian >
- "Кто хочет ответить на этот в…
16 Comments
ответить is the perfect and отвечать the imperfect.
I haven't mastered aspects yet, but I think it has something to do with answering a question being a singular action, which thus requires the perfect.
''Rather than referring to ongoing actions or past(future) actions in general, perfective verbs refer to actions in a point-wise manner, ignoring the action's inner structure. That is, such "singular" actions happen at some particular "moment" and can be conveniently arranged in a sequence when telling a story. ''