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Russian Vowels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Eimii Groupie United States Joined 5840 days ago 44 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Polish | Message 9 of 11 11 April 2009 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would try this: http://listen2russian.com/lesson08/index.html
It helped me. I find it to be very important because in some cases you won't be understood. For instance: долго and только sound very similar if you can't say the soft л correctly (from personal experience being misunderstood). Good luck. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Vilcxjo Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5647 days ago 21 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto, French Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Hebrew, Russian, German, Biblical Hebrew | Message 10 of 11 05 July 2009 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
I've started looking seriously at Russian pronunciation this summer and I think I might help with the difference between hard and soft consonants. First the terminology: "hard" means that the tongue is kept low in the mouth. "soft" means that the tongue is kept close to the top of the mouth. Since the hard palate is at the roof of the mouth, soft consonants are also called palatized. Usual English "d" as in dog is a "hard" "d". But English has something very close to a soft d: Say the word "needs" and emphasize the "ee" The tongue is close to the roof of the mouth in order to say the "ee" and stays there when you say the "ds" Now say "needs you" as a run-on phrase and keep the tongue close to the roof of the mouth for all of "eeds" Now drop off the n and say "eeds you" Now dropp off the ee, but keep the tongue up where it was for the ee and say "ds you" What you now have is a pretty close approximation to "d' yu" as many Russians say it. A lot of books don't tell you that the majority of Russians say "d' yu" with a "z" sound in it, but that occurs pretty naturally when "d" is made soft. Edited by Vilcxjo on 05 July 2009 at 12:55am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tanzoniteblack Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5636 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Japanese | Message 11 of 11 17 July 2009 at 3:01am | IP Logged | ||
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The soft hard thing is definitely phonemic, and in phonetic terms it's called palatalization. It means the middle part of the tongue moves up and forwards. And...what that all boils down to is what most people call the "i" (и) quality of the consonant. It helps me to keep in mind that despite the fact it's the vowel symbols и, я, ё, е, ю that tell you the preceding consonant is soft, it really is the preceding consonant that's soft and nothing to do with the vowel quality (already mentioned in another post was the strange examples of ш, ж, and ц which are always hard in Russian).
Examples of this from English are far between, because we don't have it as phonemic, but there are a few examples of it to help you better understand it at least: onion versus loner The n's in these differ by palatalization, though you'll need to greatly exaggerate this to make it sound like нь. The page http://www.study-languages-online.com/sounds-info.html has audio of all consonants paired between hard and soft and might help you out. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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