Thread: Question about conditional mode

Originally Posted by justinwyllie

it should simply be: Если я сниму квартиру договор будет на 11 месяцев?
Спасибо

Yes, this is correct. бы cannot be used here.

Originally Posted by justinwyllie

In Russian can you ever say бы with a future or present tense - or is it always with the past tense?

Technically, it’s not the past tense. It’s the subjunctive mood witch is formed using the бы particle and a verb form identical to one used in the past tense.

The fact that past tense verb forms and subjunctive mood verb forms are identical is not a coincidence.
What we know now as ‘past tense verbs’ used to be participles in Old Russian. That’s why they have gender and do not conjugate by person, BTW. Those participles were used with the present tense forms of the verb ‘to be’ (e. g. он есть делал instead of он делал). Later, the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense became optional in Russian and disappeared completely from those constructions.
The subjunctive mood form was the same ‘to be + participle’ form. The only difference is that the verb ‘to be’ is not in the present but in the aorist form here. Later, when the aorist disappeared in Russian, the 3rd person aorist form of the verb ‘to be’ — бы — became a particle.