"Мы ждали ночи."
Translation:We were waiting for the night.
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Does this mean "we were waiting the whole night" - or - "we were waiting for the night to begin"?
It means "We were waiting for the night to begin."
"We were waiting the whole night." is "Мы ждали всю ночь."
it is in Genitive because "ждать" means waiting and therefore it is waiting FOR something. The preposition FOR isn't there because the verb Ждать doesn't need to use prepositions (as far as I read it before). However, still the wait is FOR something so what comes next in this kind of context has to be in Genitive. Remember: "масло ДЛЯ салатА"......?
There is no reason why: one must learn that the verb ждать requires genitive if the object is inanimate, accusative in case of a person
That is not quite right. Itʼs genitive if the object cannot affect its own arrival and accusative if the object can. Sometimes a person cannot affect their own arrival time and sometimes inanimate objects can.
Itʼs genitive because the night always comes on a regular schedule and it cannot be changed. If the night could change when it arrived, then the accusative would be used.
What do all the words other than the first and the fourth mean? Ie all the words that we have not learnt yet...
Почему нельзя "we have been waiting for the night" ? Ведь время не дано?
In your sentence, "waiting" continues to the present, or very recently.
In "We were waiting", the action was in progress at a particular time in the past, for example "We were waiting for the night, bu the mayor told us to start the fireworks". The particular time is when "the mayor told us". A simpler example: "We were waiting for the night at 8 p.m.
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Does Russian have another form to express that things were already finished at the point in the past that you are referring to? Like "We had waited there for a couple of hours, but then we decided to go home."
Actually, no. Russian past tense has only two forms, imperfective and perfective, and the concept doesn't really translate directly into English. Your sentence would be "мы там ждали пару часов, но решили пойти домой". But this could also be the translation for "We waited there for two hours..." and "We were waiting there for two hours...."
I think what you’re describing is the distinction between perfective and imperfective... at least that’s how French works. But Russian perfective is something I have yet to figure out, in spite of having finished those lessons.
Can anybody explain why we need genitive here and not accusative? I thought ждать required accusative but I must be wrong
Both «ждать» and «подождать» use the accusative when the object can affect its own arrival time. When the object cannot change when it arrives, the genitive is used.
In this case, night time always comes at the same time every night and night time cannot change when it comes, so the genitive is used.
It seems like a perfectly normal sentence if you're talking about how you carried out your nefarious schemes.
A young couple is in love. They are surrounded by people and responsibilities during the day, so they have to wait for the night to be together.
Because «ждать» does not require a preposition. One must add the preposition “for” when translating into English to comply with the rules of English grammar for the verb “to wait“ and subtract it when translating into Russian to comply with the rules of Russian grammar.
For other users who just began this exercise on the past tense: The past tense doesn't distinguish by person like the present tense (me, you, he, etc). Instead, it distinguishes by gender, so there's a masculine form of the verb for a m. subject, etc... Also, it distinguishes by number, but only between singular and plural!
Why do i need "the" night? Why isnt "we were waiting for night" correct?
It would need to be either “night time,” “nighttime,” (English has two grammatical spellings), or “nightfall” (only one grammatical spelling).
Where does "for" come from? I wrote "We were waiting the night" and got the exercise wrong. Why?? There is no для.
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The Russian sentence does not need the word "for," because ждать takes the genitive case, without a preposition. The preposition is only required for the English translation.
Is this Duolingo lesson - not just this particular exercise - about the perfect aspect or the imperfect aspect or both???
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ждали is used here because the sentence refers to Мы(we) , a plural. if it was a man waiting it would be: ждал for a female waiting it would have been: ждала
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Does ждал and подожди have a sense of waiting FOR something? I ask because when I first saw this sentence, I thought it meant We were waiting at night.
"We were waiting at night" would've been "мы ждали ночью". "Ночью" is an adverb that means "at night".