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Russian writing system easy? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4672 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 32 17 March 2012 at 3:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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I keep hearing the Russian writing system is easy, and that it can be learned in a few hours. This bothers me,
because I have studied Russian for some time, and still don’t feel I know the writing system well. Here are all the things I believe one has to know: 1) Standard pronunciation of all letters; upper and lower case; upright and italics; printed and cursive. I won’t write these out, because it would take a lot of effort on my part, and they are pretty straight forward. 2) Stressed syllable. There is a stressed syllable in all multi-syllable words. The stressed syllable is pronounced longer than the unstressed syllables. One must know which syllable is stressed in order to apply vowel reduction. Ё and ю are always stressed. Other than that, there is no way to predict which syllable is stressed when reading a word. 3) Vowel reduction. The vowel letters ‘а’ and ‘о’ are pronounced [a] either in initial position or 1 syllable before stress. After the stressed syllable or more than one syllable before stress they are reduced to “schwa” [ə]. Unstressed letter ‘e’ and ‘я’ (and ‘a’ after ‘ч, щ’) are pronounced [ə] in final position. Elsewhere they reduce to [и] ([йи] if word-initial). The vowel letters э, ы, и, у, ю, ё do not undergo vowel reduction. 4) Voiced/voiceless consonants (б в г д ж з / п ф к т ш с) Voiced consonants becomes voiceless: a) at the end of a word: хлeб pronounced [хлеп]. b) before a voiceless consonant: водка pronounced [вотка]. Voiceless consonants becomes voiced before a voiced consonant (with the exception of ‘в’): экзaмен pronounced [игзaмин], but in твой ‘т’ remains voiceless. 5) As far as I know, those are all the rules that are helpful for reading. If one wants to be able to spell a word correctly after hearing it, there are several rules that reduce the possibilities of how words are spelt. Learning them will help one spell, but I won’t list them here because I’m lazy, and I’m not too interested in writing. What exactly are people saying they learn in a few hours? Are there things that I have left off this list? Are there any mistakes? Edited by Wulfgar on 17 March 2012 at 3:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5047 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 2 of 32 17 March 2012 at 4:45am | IP Logged | |||||
The stress is almost always on ё. Ё isn't stressed in some cases, ru.wiki gives some ready examples like words with the prefixes трёх- и четырёх-, compound words, ex. лёссови́дный, and in some foreign assimilated words, such as кёнигсбе́ргские сёрфинги́сты. You can read more on that here at %D0%B0)">ru.wiki source And ю is frequently stressed, but not nearly always, some examples: Ею, пОлюшко, заключЁнный, most verbs (люблЮ, прочитАю, развлекАю, but благодарЮ) and adjectives (прекрАснейшую, чистЕйшую, вИдимую) and some nouns (чАшою, лЕшую, свИтою, but чешуЮ) ending in ю, etc, etc.
чаше, чаша clearly don't reduce to the same sound. Unsure as to how much of a rule/exception this is, surely someone else would have more info. I'm pretty sure people who say Russian writing is easy enough to be learned in a couple of hours only refer to #1) in your post. Otherwise if you include all the 2,3,4,5th,... points of phonetic systems of any language regardless of which alphabet it uses it becomes a lot more complex. So it's easy as in "if you show me a letter's visual shape, I can point to its place in the alphabet and maybe say the letter's name", not easy as in "I can describe the complete phonetic structure of the language". 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4672 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 32 17 March 2012 at 5:52am | IP Logged | |||||
They sound the same to me on this Text to Speech demo http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo .html Is it wrong? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 32 17 March 2012 at 11:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's pretty simple to, indeed, point out and recognise the standard values of each letter. That the orthography gets a little inconsistent from there is indeed true, but it's not hard to get accustomed to writing letters differently. For me it's just a matter of "associate letter to standard sound, then add exceptions in cases x, y, and z".
Cyrillic is easy to read, not to pronounce, that's entirely different. Edited by tarvos on 17 March 2012 at 11:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 32 17 March 2012 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For all those who tell you that you can learn the alphabet in a couple of hours, so Russian is so easy to
read, I would suggest you let them read out loud a couple of pages in a Russian book. Yes, I also learned which letter meant what sound in Russian in a couple of hours, but I still read like a 5 year old. Ok, make that a 4 year old. This may of course be because I am dyslexic and generally stupid, but I am not the only one to struggle when reading Russian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 32 17 March 2012 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No one is saying you can't struggle with reading Russian - the problem is the translation from writing to speech (stress is irregular and not usually indicated, vowel reduction, etc.), compounded with a small vocabulary makes it hard to understand the language itself. But the CONCEPT of the alphabet is indeed easy. This is something different from reading the language out loud (which, again, requires pronunciation). It took me a few hours to get accustomed to Russian writing - I'm not comfortable pronouncing a Russian text because god knows where the stress is on the words. But stress doesn't matter when you are simply trying to read a text cursorily without repeating each word out loud. Edited by tarvos on 17 March 2012 at 4:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Itikar Groupie Italy Joined 4670 days ago 94 posts - 158 votes Speaks: Italian* | Message 7 of 32 17 March 2012 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is definitely clearer than English, especially if the words have a stress mark. But also without stress mark I find somewhat less troublesome a Russian text than an English one, despite years of exposure to the latter.
German is even clearer but one cannot always have everything. And believe me everything is better than the crass way in which English employs the Latin alphabet. :P Edited by Itikar on 17 March 2012 at 1:07pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 32 17 March 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think anyone is saying "Cyrillics can be learned in a few hours, so Russian is easy." It's just seen by many as a huge obstacle akin to the Chinese characters, while in reality, this doesn't make Russian significantly harder than Czech or especially Polish. The alphabet shouldn't be a reason neither for nor against learning a language. Don't learn Russian just because you like Cyrillics. (simply learn the alphabet and have fun with it) Don't avoid Russian just because it uses Cyrillics. Edited by Serpent on 17 March 2012 at 2:10pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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