Thread: выбирать imperfective use?

I am sure this is getting old for people so I can only apologise, but every time I get a bit further through the maze that is imperfective/perfective I uncover a new mystery.

I constantly struggle in my brain to stop the thought that imperfective equals something that can be done at any time. For example I once used to think that maybe the fact that a button can always be pressed to reach the same effect would mean it was imperfective. However the act it is describing, the pushing of a button, denotes no flow of time during the action. So if the instructions were "push the button to open the door" I would now expect the PERFECTIVE verb "push".

Such as when a site says "как сделать салат": you can make it any time but the act of making in this case doesn't denote the flow of time and is to be completed.

Just wanted to give you that journey I've travelled in my mind so you could better understand my fear of this sentence:

"Когда не хочется выбирать между сабом и шаурмой"

mrpit.jpg

Why imperfective? The act of "selecting" seems that it is an action to be completed in this case. It is not "While I was selecting I received a phone call", where I would expect imperfective. This is "When you don't want to select", just seems that that action doesn't denote the flow of time through it, simply that you don't want to complete that action. I assume if a person said "I selected the Shawarma" it would use perfective past, so when he doesn't want to conduct this selection, why imperfective?

Sorry for the rambling, hope this is understandable

I think modal verbs can affect the general pattern quite a bit sometimes. In this example, the negation and the verb "хочется" are the crucial modifiers. If you had said it like "не хочется выбрать между...", it would've sounded like "when you specifically don't want this selection to be ever made", while as long as you just mean "when you don't want to select", without going into any extra details, Imperfective is your choice.

"Нажмите кнопку, чтобы открыть дверь" uses the perfective, since the sentence looks like "do the SINGLE COMPLETE ACTION in order to other SINGLE COMPLETE ACTION happened". If you use the imperfective нажимайте, a reader will expect a continuation with an explicitly iterative context such as "каждый раз когда вы..."

"как сделать салат". Both perfective and imperfective are OK in a title, but the perfective is used far more often. The reason is: when a person is looking for that information, s/he is usually interested in having a dish made RIGHT NOW, not every day or such.


"Когда не хочется выбирать между сабом и шаурмой"
As Eric said, выбрать here sounds like "when you specifically don't want this selection to be ever made".
The imperfective moves the focus point from a result of an action/process to to the process itself.