Breakdown of Сдав экзамены, студенты начали отдыхать.
студент
student (m)
отдыхать
to rest
экзамен
exam
начать
to begin (perfective)
сдать
to pass (an exam)
Questions & Answers about Сдав экзамены, студенты начали отдыхать.
How is сдав formed from the verb сдать?
Сдав is a perfective verbal adverb meaning "having passed". To form it, you take the masculine past tense of the perfective verb сдать (which is сдал), drop the -л, and add the suffix -в. While the lesson mentions both -в and -вши, the -в suffix is the standard choice for non-reflexive verbs whose past tense stem ends in a vowel.
I thought the verb meant "to take an exam". Does сдав mean "having taken" or "having passed"?
It specifically means "having passed". This is a classic tricky pair in Russian! The imperfective сдавать экзамен focuses on the process of taking the test, regardless of the outcome. The perfective сдать экзамен means you successfully passed it. Since сдав is built from the perfective verb, the students definitely passed.
Can I use сдав in a sentence like "Having passed the exams, the summer started for the students"?
No, you can't do that in Russian. A strict rule for verbal adverbs is that the action they describe must be performed by the main subject of the sentence. In our sentence, студенты (the students) is the subject, and they are the ones who both passed the exams and started to rest. If you made "the summer" the subject, the sentence would grammatically imply that the summer passed the exams!
Why is the imperfective verb отдыхать used after начали?
This is because of the verb начали (started). In Russian, "phasal" verbs—which are verbs that express the beginning, continuing, or finishing of an action (like начать, продолжать, or закончить)—must always be followed by an imperfective infinitive. They focus on the ongoing process of the new action, so the perfective form cannot be used here.
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