Thread: Equivalents of "the wrong"?

I'm having some trouble piecing together exactly what my book is telling me about the equivalents of "the wrong ________" here is some examples. If anyone could help explain, that would be great.

I appreciate it a bunch!

-Pyrius

Вы не так сморите.
Вы не туда идёте.
Вы взяли не ту книгу.
Это не тот автобус.
Вы взяли не свой ключ.
Ты купил не такие марки.

Вы не так сморите. - You are looking in the wrong way. (The way you are looking is not that way /which was expected/.)
Вы не туда идёте. - You are going the wrong way. (The way you are going is not that way.)
Вы взяли не ту книгу. - You took the wrong book. (You took not that book.)
Это не тот автобус. - It is the wrong bus. (It is not that bus /which you need/.)
Вы взяли не свой ключ. - You've taken the wrong key. (You've taken not your's key)
Ты купил не такие марки. - You've bought the wrong stamps. (You've bought not those stamps.)

So, how would you know what Russian forms to use in context? Translating from Russian to English is easy. Going from English to Russian is a bit more challenging for me.

As a first step you can just use "неправильный" and "неправильно" instead of English "wrong". It is also acceptable.

Originally Posted by Pyrius

So, how would you know what Russian forms to use in context? Translating from Russian to English is easy. Going from English to Russian is a bit more challenging for me.

Does it help you that не always negates the constituent of the sentence which follows it? While in English you would say "you did not take the right key" with a certain ambiguity as to whether it was a failure to take a key or rather the wrong key, in Russian the negated element in "Вы взяли не свой ключ" must be свой. That means that in the Russian sentence the act of taking a key must have taken place, but it was "not yours", so it was by definition the wrong one. As you can see in all the examples, the negated element is always the one after не.