Understanding word order

Привет друзья! Можете помочь с моим вопросом? Благодарю вас!

I am going through the introduction lessons and came across this sentence:

вам нужно будет как следует изучить исправления по вашему тексиу.

I understand the translation. As a native English speaker, I do not understand the word ordering. A literal translation is strange.

Can someone give me some hints on grammar I can study to help me understand this?

In Russian word order is not too important. The inflectional endings of the words indicate their role in the sentence, unlike English which relies much more heavily on word order to distinguish predicate from subject, e.g. Fortunately, it helps us English speakers that the usual word order is similar to English. As for your sentence…

What is a little out of the ordinary here is “как следует”. I think you need to take that as a unit that serves as an adjective adverb, it’s third-person singular verb notwithstanding. The robots translate it as “well”, “properly”, “to a nicety”, and more literally “as follows”. The verb doesn’t relate to any subject or predicate in the sentence – the two words can be treated as a single unit.

“вам нужно” (to) you necessary
“будет” (it) will be
“изучить” to study
“как следует” properly
“исправления” corrections
“по вашему тексту” to your text.

These parts can be moved about somewhat without changing the meaning but, perhaps, changing emphasis. (This flexibility, btw, lends itself nicely to the composition of poetry.) Here are some possible re-orderings of the same sentence with the same meaning. It might take a native speaker to opine on how (un)natural-sounding they are, but the meaning I believe is the same:

Исправления по вашему тексту как следует вам будет нужно изучить.
Изучить испрваления по вашему тексту как следует будет вам нужно.

The будет third-person-singular form of the verb here might be what’s confusing? There is no explicit third-person subject. Where in English we’ll use “it” or “there” as an indefinite subject, Russian will leave it out and let the form of the verb carry that weight. “(It) will be necessary for you to study” is phrased in Russian without the “it” which doesn’t actually refer to anything real that you can point at. (I recently raised a question about a related construct using the third-person past tense neuter form of the verb, which seemed unusual though I’ve long been familiar with the usage in your sentence.)

How is it obvious that none of the (pro)nouns in the sentence are the subject? “You” cannot be the subject, because it’s in the dative form (вам, to you). Likewise тексту is dative, because of the particular proposition that its the object of, so it cannot be the subject. Исправления could be the subject of a sentence because there’s no difference between the nominative and accusative forms of neuter nouns. However, this is plural, and the verb is singular, so that can’t be it; исправления is actually the object of the verb будет изучить.

This type of in-depth parsing is rarely necessary. One learns to understand the sense of sentences fairly easily, I think, and the structure is usually obvious. It’s never necessary for conversational speech. There are occasionally times, though, when the author of a literary work crafts a long, complex sentence, and I find myself needing to do this sort of analysis. (I’ve maintained that the declensions and conjugations make it easier to understand such sentences since the words’ forms give very strong clues to their role in a convoluted sentence.) The more one is exposed to the language, the less analysis is necessary, and I would hope that native speakers never need to stop and do this.
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Thank you taking the time to write a well written explanation! That really helped. Based on the last paragraph, I am probably trying to over think/analyze Russian. :frowning:

Some analysis is unavoidable when beginning to learn how things fit together. You don’t want to get lost in over-analysis, though, so hopefully what follows doesn’t roil the waters too much…

Re-reading what I wrote, I believed that I erred in saying изучения is the object of будет изучить. The core of your sentence is simply вам будет нужно – to/for you it will be necessary. To study (изучить) is what it will be necessary to do. But it is not accurate to say as I did that the verb is будет изучить.

You may know by now that there are 2 forms of every Russian verb – imperfective and perfective (e.g. изучать/изучить), and each is used in a different way in the future tense. The indefinite, ongoing future tense (he/she/it will be studying, will study for an indefinite period) is будет изучать, using the imperfective form. He/she/it will study and be done is simply изучит, using the perfective. There is no tense that uses будет with the perfective form.

(The word for “perfect” in several languages can mean “complete” in addition to “ideal”, and it’s used in the former sense when speaking of grammar. Russian совершенный has these meanings, too: absolute, complete, perfect.)

One thing that helped me better understand was getting it out of my head that I was incorrectly learning вам as a dative pronoun. That helped with the understanding.

I have see a little bit of the imperfect/perfect tenses. The explanation took some care of some confusion with some of the places that had the tenses but didn’t address it in the lessons.

I am having a hard time thinking about how to say something in English and trying to fit that into Russian. It doesnt often work that way. A good lesson for anyone reading this thread! I can definitely see myself breaking out of that habit as I get more exposure and experience in the language.

Thank you again for the detailed help!

Вам is a dative pronoun. Вам нужно = To you it is necessary.