Questions & Answers about Медленный человек не спешит.
How do we know how to conjugate спешит?
The dictionary form of this verb is спешить (to hurry). Because it ends in -ить, it belongs to the second conjugation. To say "he/she/it hurries" for the subject человек (person), we drop the -ить and add the third-person singular ending -ит, resulting in спешит.
The translation says "is not in a hurry", but I don't see words for "is" or "in". Why?
English uses the phrase "in a hurry", but Russian simply uses an action verb: спешить (to hurry). Additionally, Russian does not use a "to be" verb (like "is") in the present tense. So не спешит literally translates to "does not hurry".
The letter ш sounds hard. Why is спешит spelled with an и instead of an ы?
This is due to the 7-letter spelling rule. Even though you pronounce the ending like a hard "ы" sound, you can never write the letter ы after г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, or щ. Because the verb stem ends in ш, we are forced to write the ending with an и.
Why does Медленный end in -ый?
Медленный (slow) is an adjective describing человек (person). Since человек is a masculine noun and is the subject of the sentence (nominative case), the adjective takes the standard masculine ending -ый.
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