Interesting that you should use the phrase "I went to the store"... I took Russian for two years in college, and, while I can get around Moscow alright, ask for

Interesting that you should use the phrase "I went to the store"... I took Russian for two years in college, and, while I can get around Moscow alright, ask for directions, and exchange a few sentences of banter with Russian speakers I meet at parties, I'm hardly fluent. But the phrase "I went to the store" could be constructed in a HUGE number of ways in Russian, as there is no word in Russian that simply means "went" or "go" like we have in English. Did you go to the store and come back? Was it a unidirectional journey? Do you go to the store often? Did you drive to the store? Did you walk to the store? Did you go inside the store? Did you obtain the endpoint of store as a goal? The phrase "<foo> went to <bar>" can be (and, indeed must be -- no easy outs) conjugated and declined in so many freaking ways in Russian, with subtle meanings encoded in those conjugations and declensions, it's nuts. I used to be great at the verbs of motion a long time ago, but, because I haven't been religiously practicing and thinking about them, I just avoid them altogether at this point. (The last time I tried saying "Are you driving to Boston?" I accidentally said "Are you wandering around aimlessly in Boston by car?") My point though, is that I would argue that there is a very good reason to think deeply about the sentence "I went to the store" in Russian, and think deeply about all of the ways you can say it, modify it, and replace its component parts to achieve different meanings, and how those meanings relate to the meanings of other sentences containing the same component parts. I certainly wish I had done that more often!