Breakdown of Если вам нужен хороший портной, то идите в это ателье.
вы
you (plural)
этот
this [f: эта, n: это]
хороший
good
в
in / to (direction)
идти
to go (on foot) / to proceed, go (of a process)
нужен
needed (нужен, нужна, нужны)
если
if
то
then (in that case)
портной
tailor
ателье
tailor shop
Questions & Answers about Если вам нужен хороший портной, то идите в это ателье.
The current lesson is about attenuated comparatives with по-. How could we use one in this sentence to say 'a somewhat better tailor'?
You could replace хороший портной with портной получше (a tailor a bit better). When using these comparatives to modify a noun, it is very common to place them right after the noun for natural flow: Если вам нужен портной получше...
Why does the sentence use нужен instead of the impersonal нужно?
In Russian, 'you need a tailor' is structured as 'to you a tailor is necessary.' The word for 'necessary' (нужен) is a short adjective that must agree in gender and number with the thing being needed, which is the grammatical subject of the clause. Because портной is masculine, we use the masculine нужен rather than the neuter нужно.
The word портной looks like an adjective ending in -ой. Is it an adjective or a noun?
It is a noun meaning 'tailor', but grammatically it is a 'substantivized adjective'—a word that originated as an adjective and still declines exactly like one. For example, if you wanted to say 'I don't have a good tailor' (which requires the genitive case), you would decline both words with adjective endings: У меня нет хорошего портного.
Is the word то before идите strictly necessary?
No, it is optional. In an Если ..., то ... (If ..., then ...) construction, the то adds emphasis and structure to the cause-and-effect relationship, much like adding the word 'then' in an English 'if/then' sentence. You could drop it and just say ...хороший портной, идите в это ателье.
Why does ателье take the neuter pronoun это, and why doesn't its ending change after the preposition в?
Ателье is a borrowed French word. In Russian, foreign loan words that end in an un-Russian vowel ending (like -е, -о, -и, or -у) and denote inanimate objects are almost always neuter and completely indeclinable. It takes the neuter это, and its form remains exactly the same in the accusative case here as it would in any other case.
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