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Russian spelling and pronounciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Evanitious Triglot Newbie France Joined 4524 days ago 36 posts - 39 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1, Italian | Message 1 of 3 15 June 2014 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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Hi everyone :)
I was wondering if there was a rule or some tips to understand if an "o" is pronounced "a" or not in Russian. ex: молоко is pronounced малако I'm asking because most of the time when I read a new word I guess it naturally or maybe that's just an impression but I can't explain why I would pronounce "a" on this syllable and not another. As it seems I guess it right I thought there must be some kind of a rule ? To be honest, I didn't really study Russian a lot. A long time ago I started with Assimil and I didn't even reach the half of the book, but I spent a year and a half watching movies/series in Russian language with no subtitles, almost everyday. I understand a lot now even if somehow I guess it was a waste of time cause I could have learned much more vocabulary faster with texts. Like this expression : прошу прощения, I've heard it like 100 times in movies but I only understood it when I found the translation in a book. On the other hand I suppose it gave my ear a good training. I speak very few words compared to what I understand but people say I have a very good accent. Also it's like I can almost write what I hear correctly. Which leads to another question, I said "almost" because I always make some mistakes with some sounds, when I want to write some new words I hear, I never know if it is "е" or "и" or "ы", also these letters are not easy to guess in words : "ь", "ъ", "й". I'm trying real hard with this word : пожалуйста, but I still hear пожалуста but a Latvian friend told me I pronounce it right. So I was wondering if there are some ways to distinguish these letters or maybe I'm doing it the wrong way and I should just learn more written vocabulary with the pronounciation instead of listening and trying to guess how it's written. Maybe I should try English movies with Russian subtitles now but I was curious to know if there were some rules. Thanks ! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5194 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 2 of 3 16 June 2014 at 2:28am | IP Logged |
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One could probably write down some rules for stress placement in certain word types, but there would be so many exceptions that the rules would only cover a minority of all words - so not very useful. None of the courses I have studied provided rules. I would say it's better to pick up the common patterns naturally with time.
Watching movies every day will indeed train your ear. But if you want to spell all the words correctly, better to read texts, with stress marks if possible. The website russiangram.com could help - it adds stress marks to Russian texts you paste in. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6602 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 3 of 3 16 June 2014 at 12:45pm | IP Logged |
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Well, there are pretty clear rules for ъ, ь, й.
ъ denotes that я, е or ю retain the j/й sound. ь softens the consonants at the end of the syllable/word or adds an й before и. these can't be used in the beginning of a word or after vowels. if you have a й sound in these positions, write й (in the beginning й is more rare and only used in loan words). пожалуста is the casual pronunciation (sometimes even пжалста). in a very formal recording you would hear the й more clearly. е and и can have the same sound, ы less so. can you distinguish hard and soft consonants? ы is only used after hard ones, и after soft. e can be used in either case, pronounced as э after a hard consonant. also, in unstressed syllables the spelling is generally morphological, ie the same as in other words with the same root. but there's a significant exception and it has a few of its own exceptions too. for me these rules are pretty simple but i'm a native speaker :-) as for your learning strategy, try GLOSS. I think the more traditional textbooks will be boring to you, but the gloss lessons are really cool. you can find a full text, translation and recording for each lesson (including reading lessons), click "source" at the top. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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