Breakdown of В детстве мы проводили всё лето у бабушки и часто играли на чердаке.
и
and
мы
we
часто
often
играть
to play
на
on, at / by (transport) / to (a place) / to (in answer to)
у
at, by
бабушка
grandmother
лето
summer
в
on / during (a time period)
весь
all, the whole, everything, everyone (весь, вся, всё, все)
детство
childhood
проводить
to spend (time)
чердак
attic
Questions & Answers about В детстве мы проводили всё лето у бабушки и часто играли на чердаке.
Why are the verbs проводили and играли both in the imperfective aspect here?
This ties perfectly into our current lesson on repeated sequences in the past. Even though spending a whole summer feels like a completed block of time, it happened repeatedly throughout the speaker's childhood. For habitual or repeated past routines, Russian uses the imperfective aspect for all the actions in the sequence.
Why is it всё лето (singular) instead of plural, if this happened repeatedly over multiple years?
In Russian, you use the singular всё лето (the whole summer) as an accusative expression of time to describe the duration of the repeated event. It means that each time the yearly cycle came around, the entire summer was spent there. Using the plural here would sound unnatural, as if you were mathematically counting the summers.
As a quick refresher, why do we use у бабушки to mean at grandma's rather than a word for house?
Using the preposition у followed by a person in the genitive case is the standard, idiomatic way to say at someone's place in Russian. While you could grammatically say в доме бабушки (in grandma's house), у бабушки is much more natural and common.
Why does чердаке (attic) take the preposition на instead of в?
In Russian, the attic (чердак) is traditionally treated as a surface or a structural level of the house (like a roof, balcony, or floor) rather than an enclosed room. Because of this, it takes на plus the prepositional case instead of в.
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