Thread: Lesson 13 questions

Sorry it has taken so long to respond. I appreciate all your help and thoughtful discussion. I've been without internet service for a while and then came the hurricane.

The sentence "Did you go there by plane?" came from a translation excercise with a series of sentences. The sentences preceding the one I asked about are, "Have you ever been in the south of the USSR? Yes, I was six days in Yalta. I like Yalta much more than Sochi.", then, "Did you go there by plane?" Would that still be Ты туда летал?

Z

Originally Posted by zorro

"Did you go there by plane?" Would that still be Ты туда летал?

Summing up what Bob and Doomer have said, note that Ты туда летал? has more than one possible answer:

Да, на самолёте. "Yes, [I flew] by airplane."
Нет, на вертолёте*. "No, [I flew] by helicopter."
Нет, я ездил на поезде. "No, [I went] by train."

So you could phrase the question as Ты туда летал? if the questioner wants to know whether the person traveled by air or by land or by water. If it's known that the traveler flew, but the questioner doesn't know whether it was in an airplane, helicopter, hot-air balloon, alien spacecraft, etc., then Ты туда летал на самолёте? would be the appropriate phrasing. You could even say Ты туда ездил на самолёте?, using the more generic verb for travelling-by-vehicle, instead of the verb "to fly".

* P.S. The root -верт- means "spin; rotate", by the way -- so a вертолёт is basically "a thing that flies by spinning", while самолёт is basically "a self-flying thing")

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

You could even say Ты туда ездил на самолёте?, using the more generic verb for travelling-by-vehicle, instead of the verb "to fly".

Sorry, but I think "ездить на самолёте" is too awkward. I would hardly ever say it like that. We say "я ездил на поезде", but "я летал на самолёте".
Yes, the verb "ездить" can be used as a generic verb if the means of transportation is not mentioned at all. So, I can say "я ездил в Америку" (I travelled to the US) regardless if a used a plain, a train or a boat to get there. We do say it like this, imagine a possible dialogue:
- Ты был в Нью-Йорке?
- Да, я ездил туда в прошлом году.
- На машине?
- Нет, я летал на самолёте.

But if travelling by air is explicitly mentioned, then "ездить" sounds strange. At least to me.

I checked yandex (the Russian search engine):
"летал на самолёте" - 50,000 occurrences, "ездил на самолёте" - 264 occurrences (I only searched for the fixed expression by using the quotation marks). So, someone may use it occasionally, but I would not recommend.