"Future Tense Perfective Verbs" has a lot of sentences that shouldn't be in the collection

The “Future Tense Perfective Verbs” collection contains a lot of sentences where the verb is not actually future/perfective.

For instance:

Никто не знает, где мы находимся.
No one knows where we are.

Wiktionary says that находимся could be either imperfective or perfective, but the находиться page says that the verb is strictly imperfective. I’m not sure whether these mixed messages from Wiktionary are responsible for the misclassification of the sentence. But whoever adds the sentences to, or removes them from, the collection should look at the English translations to see whether they relate to the future. This one clearly does not.

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When you’re dealing with verbs it’s always a good approach to go to the infinitive. Infinitive form here is “находиться”. This is also a reflexive verb “находиться=находить себя”. And this is an imperfective verb. It is impossible for it to be perfective, because perfective verbs are used to indicate a complete action, focus on the result, as opposed to the process. Imperfective verbs describe an ongoing, continuous action - can be something that happens/happened/will be happening every Wednesday or is/was/will be happening in the moment (what -ing verbs do in English). So the point is - it it impossible for a perfective verb to exist in present tense. Because the present is happening, so the action can never be complete. “Мы находимся” is present. It’s happening right now. So it can only be imperfective.

Wiktionary is wrong when they list that it can be “first-person plural future indicative perfective”. It will be “найдёмся”. Example: Никто не знает где мы найдёмся через год - nobody knows where we will find ourselves in a year. Except it’s a little weird (at least to me) and I think most people would prefer to say *Никто не знает где мы найдём себя через год".

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Everything you say makes sense, @oldsadgoth.

To summarize:

Clozemaster’s criterion in choosing sentences for the “Future Tense Perfective Verbs” collection seems to be “Pick sentences where the verb form could be perfective according to Wiktionary.” But I think there should be at least one more step: “Reject sentences where a human reader can see that either the source sentence or the translation is in the present.” (Since English frequently uses the grammatical present tense to indicate the future, I’m not sure there’s a good automated way of determining whether an English sentence that uses a present tense form is in the present or future.)

Meanwhile, a Clozemaster player’s procedure for determining whether a sentence is correctly assigned to the “Future Tense Perfective Verbs” collection could be something like this: If the translation is in the present tense, and especially if the verb describes an ongoing state rather one that can be completed, there’s a good chance that the sentence should not be in this collection. If you really want to be sure, it’s a better idea to go to the Wiktionary page for the infinitive because there’s generally more and better information there.

Here’s another sentence that we can use as an example:

Розы вкусно пахнут.
Roses smell nice.

The fact that the verb (a) is in the present tense and (b) describes an ongoing state is a warning flag. The Wiktionary page for пахнут lists two possibilities: the word is па́хнут, a form of the imperfective verb па́хнуть, or пахну́т, a form of the perfective verb пахну́ть. The page for the infinitive gives two “etymologies”: па́хнуть, meaning “to smell (of)”, and пахну́ть, meaning “to puff, to blow”. So I guess in order to interpret the sentence as future perfective, one would need to translate it as “Roses puff nice”, which of course doesn’t make much sense. Conclusion: the sentence should not be in the collection.

Disclaimer: I’m not a native Russian speaker, so my reasoning is based on logic rather than familiarity with the words.

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