As you know perfectly, Slavic verbs come in pairs (perfective-imperfective). But, in Southern Slavic languages this distinction is quite blurry, as Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, and especially Macedonian and Bulgarian can use the present tense in all verbs, not only in the imperfective ones.
3 Likes
I think possibly what you perceive as different is the way they are used to form he idea of a future meaning possibly. The imperfective and perfective differences between the verbs is definitely there. As a learner I think it’s he most difficult aspect of Slavic languages to master too - mostly because you can often use both and you don’t realise that you’re not saying what you think you’re saying and the listener had no clue you didn’t mean what you said! 
4 Likes
This is why I think I’ll have to wait until I’m retired to be able to learn a Slavic language to a decent level 
2 Likes
As a learner of Russian, Ukrainian, Czech (and soon) Polish, I find it also quite hard to distinguish them, since they, as opposed to most of the western European languages, have less aspect tenses, and I personally find it hard when to describe an action at a certain time… Any advices, tips or infornation about a better understanding of this topic?
I would really appreciate it.
Regards to everyone.
2 Likes
My advice would be… expose yourself to each of the languages as much as you can!
I (as a native spaker of one Slavic language) can say that I could understand Russian, Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Montenegrian language/s, Bulgarian, Slovak, Serbian, … and other Slavic languages to certain amont (this is advantages if you decide to learn one Slavic language - you can understand all of them to a certain amount 
) but if you want to speak them fluently - it is harder!!!
Even I didn’t start learning my 3. Slavic language until I “mastered” second. Anyway it happens that we mix similar languages together but if you are just at the beginning and learning 2 or more languages in the same time you can either mix them all the time or learn simultaneously all sentences, words, grammar of languages and remember those differences better… by learning all the languages together.
But I guess this could be quite exhausting to do every day… you know learning 3 languages every day when we sometime don’t wanna learn even one can be tiring 
…
I personally prefer to “master” one before I go to second and this way I don’t mix them up as much . But this is me. You might prefer some other way
I feel your pain… I actually used to think the same… I did speak Slovene as a native language but yet I somehow wasn’t able to acquire another Slavic language.
I thought that … well…they just can’t be learned 
… the problem was just that - that I wasn’t using the right techniques
Now I see… when I manage to learn Russian suddenly my comprehensiveness of Ukrainian and even Belorussin improved… in Slovakia (now I am working on this language) I was able to have a conversation with Slovaks (this was before I learned Russian, i just spoke Slovene) and until I answer that I am not from Slovakia, that I am a foreigner, but that I can understand them anyway… they would just smile in response and keep on talking 
- this can happend to you if you are on “električka” or waiting for a bus.
So, my realisation - don’t give up… keep trying until you find your own way to acquire- not to learn - the languages
It is worth it!!! You will learn one but understand 12
I am not sure what you mean by saying the differences between the imperfective and perfective aspects “are definitely there”. Perfectivity and imperfectivity are semantic concepts that speakers of any language clearly distinguish, whether they are formalized in the language or not. Unfortunately for people who have set their minds on learning Serbian the formal distinction between these two concepts in our language is badly and widely misrepresented in linguistic literature and elsewhere which makes the task of learning the language more difficult than it would have been otherwise. One cannot hope to even start discussing as complex a subject as the verb aspect in a forum post, but let it suffice to say here that the Serbian verb phrase has no formal indicators of the perfectivity/imperfectivity of the situation comparable to English where the morpheme -ing serves this purpose. More often than not people who discuss the perfectivity/imperfectivity dichotomy in the Slavic verb phrase don’t have sound knowledge of the very concepts critical for understanding the verb aspect. Let it be added here too that understanding the formal representation of the verb aspect in any language requires the person to be a fluent speaker of that language. No knowledge of general linguistics can help if one cannot test his ideas in the real language in use.
I am perfectly aware of the fact that the misconception of the Slavic verbs coming in perfective-imperfective pairs is everywhere in literature on linguistics, and even in some widely recognized linguistics works in English. It is no less clear to me that taking such view is bound to cause a lot of confusion for learners of Serbian/Croatian. Verbs in Serbian do come in pairs only this pairing is not done according to their perfectivity. To explain the purpose of this pairing in Serbian would take far more space than allowed here, and it couldn’t be limited to this famous pairing - one simply needs to take a far wider perspective on the verb morphology if he’s to understand how the Serbian verbal system really works. A learner of Serbian should first learn about the prefixation of the morphologically simple verbs, that is obviously the outstanding aspect of the verb morphology in Serbian. He’ll soon notice that those prefixes are prepositions, and that they combine with verb stems to produce a variety of aspectual, locational and other meanings. It will be easily understood that these verbs do not simply pair - they combine with prefixes to produce a multitude of other verbs. When this morphological complexity is compared to English the languages may seem different as night and day, but on a closer look they certainly won’t look so, and there is a number of convincing linguistic facts to prove that, but again it won’t fit into this space, so the reader will have to take my word for it. Here, I’d suggest that the novice Serbian learner who has a good command of English consider English verbal counterparts. Instead of taking the preposition/verb compounding in English (which would provide a closer perspective and a better match to what is actually done in Serbian but would take a more complex elaboration), one can stick to the verb-preposition combinations in English and see what happens there. Complementing a verb with one and the same preposition can clearly alter the meaning in different ways: get up, drink up, give up… The first contributes a locational meaning, the second aspectual and the last one has no meaning of its own and serves as a meaning shifter in the idiomatic verbal combination. Now, this would provide a good starting point for learning the complexity of the verb-preposition compounding in Serbian.
No need to wait until retirement, learning a Slavic language is not a horror people make it out to be. For some reason this myth of the extraordinary “difficulty” of learning a Slavic language is spread wide and far. Speakers of Slavic languages face the same difficulties in acquiring English as English speakers do in learning a Slavic language - it takes the same amount of adjustment to learn the linguistic concepts unfamiliar to the learner in both languages. Let me assure you that these languages are no mythical beasts that only very special people can learn. Clearly, one can make the process both longer and more frustrating by adopting false views right at the start instead of simply getting down to work and working through the aspects of language that might seem daunting at the first glance. The morphology of Serbian/Croatian is elaborate and complex but the whole system is highly logical and with a little patience that learning any language requires, it can be mastered to a decent level in a reasonable amount of time.