Thread: future perfect/conditional

What's the best way to say the following in Russian?

By the time you get here, I will already have told him.

If he had lived longer, he would have written many more masterpieces.

Thanks

I post only to 'join in' the discussion, not to answer the question

As I understood it, there is no difference between the second and third conditional (as we use the terms in English) in Russian, so that
If he ate more, he would be fatter
and
If he had eaten more, he would have been fatter

will look the same in Russian.. true?

(btw your choice of 'If he had lived longer..' is a bit different, because the 2nd conditional equivalent 'If he lived longer, he would write many more masterpieces' would be very unusual for semantic reasons. Anyway it'll be something like 'yesli biy on zhil ....' etc. , right?)

And for the other type of sentences, we have a similar issue. There is only the perfective future vs the imperfective ('budu'+infinitive) future. I'd suppose that you need to use the perfective verb future for 'I will have done' constructions (because completion is implied), and that they can only be distinguished from 'I will do' constructions by context .. is that right?

К тому времени когда ты доберешься сюда, я уже скажу ему.

Если бы он прожил дольше, он бы написал намного больше шедевров.

Originally Posted by waxwing

If he ate more, he would be fatter
and
If he had eaten more, he would have been fatter

will look the same in Russian.. true?

Yes, in Russian in both cases it'll be "Если бы он ел больше, он был бы толще".

Thanks Alexei! I learned German before Russian, so I always expect this tense to be more complicated than it is in Russian.

Sure, no problem.

когда ты доберёшься сюда, я ему уже расскажу

он бы написал гораздо больше шедевров, проживи он чуть дольше ...