Yesterday we discussed one of the uses of пока in sentences where it means “while.” Sometimes you may encounter a clause that contains both пока and the negative particle не. The first time you see such a thing, you might produce a first-guess translation like this:

What the devil? Let's see. If she slept while something didn't happen, that means she stopped sleeping when it did happen... in other words, she slept until the alarmclock started rining! That's right: often the proper translation for пока in combination with не is “until”:

This use of «пока…не» to mean “until” can happen in any tense: past, present, or future. The clause in which «пока…не» occurs is called a subjoined clause. For the most part you find the perfective past or perfective future in subjoined пока clauses:

It is also possible for an imperfective verb to appear in the “until” clause if you have to habitually wait for it:

Notice that in the first example, both clauses had an imperfective past tense; in the second — an imperfective present tense. It would be logical to assume that you could also put together a sentence like this with both clauses in the imperfective future. In other words something like:

But when Russians hear such sentences, they tend not to like the imperfective future in the subjoined clause. Instead the perfective future sounds better to them:

This is one of those instances where aspect doesn't work quite like we would expect from our beginning textbooks. Frankly, aspect is one of the most consistently tricky parts of the Russian language.

I wish I could say that пока in composition with не should always be translated “until,” but that is simply not the case. Crud. That means I may have to write about two more meanings of пока.