"Что" and "чтобы" - what are they for?

Hi, I'm here again. :) At first I planned to devote this post to the next grammar case (as you remember, we have six of them), but I changed my mind when I got an interesting question from one of the students of Russian. The question was, what is the difference between "что" and "чтобы" in complex sentences. It's actually not that obvious, really. But what is particularly valuable, this question gives rise to other questions. So, let's begin.

The conjunction "что" is basically used in two types of situations. In the first case it's translated by 'what': "Я знаю, что Анна читает" is 'I know what (which book) Anna's reading'. The trick is, that this conjunction can also mean 'that': 'I know that Anna's reading (not jogging and not watching TV)' is also "Я знаю, что Анна читает". How do we manage to understand what our partners mean? Entirely from their intonation (I'll cover it in one of my posts later on, don't worry). 

The conjunction "чтобы" can also be used in quite different situations. For example, in the context like "Я приехал в Париж, чтобы увидеть Мону Лизу" ('I came to Paris to see Mona Lisa') or "Анна дала мне книгу, чтобы я её прочитал" ('Anna gave me a book to read') to give the reason for an action. Here there is one trick: if the subject of two parts of the sentence is the same, we normally use the infinitive in the second one (after "чтобы") without mentioning the subject, otherwise we need the Past Tense form of a verb and the subject (see the examples). There is another case when you need this conjunction, namely, when you' like to say that some action is necessary to achieve the result. For this we use expressions like "Нужно много работать, чтобы достичь успеха" (or "Чтобы достичь успеха, нужно много работать"), so in the ''first' part (one we describe the result in) we use words like нужно, необходимо etc. + an infinitive, and in the second part just an infinitive. Please notice that we don't mention the subject in the first part, nor in the second one, since we're talking somehow of all the possible subjects. However, if you'd like to state that it's true only for one subject, you can use the subject in the dative as usual in the constructions like "кому нужно что (что делать/сделать)": "Тебе нужно много заниматься, чтобы сдать экзамен" (so you have to work hard, and I probably not :)).

This conjunction "чтобы" is also used in the phrases like "Моя жена сказала, чтобы я купил хлеба". In this case it can be also translated with 'to', but the meaning is different ('My wife told me to buy some bread', so she wanted me to buy it). Of course, you can just an infinitive in this context: "Моя жена сказала мне купить хлеба". However, this infinitive construction is a bit more demanding with regard to grammar cases. For example, we say "она сказала мне (dative) принести воды", but "она попросила меня (accusative) принести меня". We'll be talking about this in some days, though up to that point you can just use the construction with "чтобы", which is much simpler: you just use after "чтобы" a noun or a pronoun in the nominative case. :) However, you need to remember that not all the verbs can be used adequately with both infinitive and "чтобы". So the verb просить/попросить (and in some cases сказать, требовать/потребовать) can be use with either, while, for example, the verb помочь/помогать is never used with "чтобы", it requires an infinitive.

Hope, I didn't confuse you too much. :) If you have any questions or corrections, please let me know. See you next time, and let's switch then to our main topic: Russian grammar cases.