Breakdown of Директор занят, ему надо заплатить налог и штраф.
и
and
директор
director
ему
to him, to it
надо
must, need to
занят
busy (занят, занята, заняты)
заплатить
to pay
налог
tax
штраф
fine
Questions & Answers about Директор занят, ему надо заплатить налог и штраф.
Why does the sentence use ему instead of он for the word "he"?
This is the impersonal structure for expressing obligation! In Russian, you don't literally say "he needs"; instead, the phrasing is more like "to him it is necessary." Because of this, the person who needs to do the action must take the Dative case. Ему is the Dative form of он.
Why is the word for busy занят and not the regular adjective занятый?
Занят is a short-form adjective. Russian often uses short forms to describe temporary states. The director is busy right now, so we use the short form instead of the long form занятый, which would imply he is a generally busy type of person all the time.
Why do we use the verb заплатить here instead of платить?
Заплатить is the perfective form of the verb. It is used here because paying this specific tax and fine is a single, one-time action that the director needs to complete. If he needed to pay taxes regularly as a habit, you would use the imperfective verb платить.
What case are налог and штраф in, and why didn't their endings change?
They are in the Accusative case because they are the direct objects of the action (the things being paid). Because they are both inanimate masculine nouns, their Accusative forms look exactly the same as their Nominative (dictionary) forms.
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