Quote Originally Posted by G2Ident89 View Post
The thing I'm having trouble with is that in English, a sentence like, 'They were going to give him the book', is ambiguous. There are actually two distinct interpretations.
The one: 'They were going - to give him the book', meaning that they set out 'to give him the book'. In Russian, I think this would be something like, 'они пойтили давать ему книгу' with the intended meaning of something more like, 'They set out to give him the book'.
The second: 'They were - going to give him the book', meaning that they intended 'to give him the book' but the action was never actually undertaken. This is where I'm confused. How would you translate this sentence with this second intended meaning into Russian? Can you just put it in the conditional, so that you have, 'они пойтили бы давать ему книгу'?
This is what I meant when I said you should not expect something which works in one language to work the same way in another language. Russian simply doesn't use the verb "go" to signify future tense in the fashion English does. The verb идти means movement towards a place by walking, not an intention to do something in the future. (By the way the past tense form of, for example, пойти is пошёл, пошла, and not formed by appending the regular suffixes).

Furthermore, as far as I know, the pretty complex distinction of "going to" future as opposed to "will" future is also absent in Russian, while of course it is possible to use specific additional words to give the meaning of a phrase a certain slant.