jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6706 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map
| Message 9 of 31 13 November 2015 at 6:09pm | IP Logged |
"SHCH" is pronounced something like "SHuhCHuh".
Well, I've never heard it be pronounced like that (except maybe in Nikita Chrushchev?). It's a soft ш (and for anybody familiar with Mandarin pinyin, Щ matches x, while ш matches sh - sort of!).
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CitizenJimserac Newbie United States Joined 3118 days ago 13 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Russian
| Message 10 of 31 13 November 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged |
I don't quite get that Mandarin connection - (and for anybody familiar with Mandarin pinyin, Щ matches x, while ш
matches sh - sort of!)
For example the word for heart, which in PinYin is XIN, to me sounds like (phonetically) "sheen" .
But I agree with the "sort of" part ! I didn't realize how hard it was to describe sounds in text until I tried writing it
down !
Thanks!
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Dragon27 Diglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 4038 days ago 41 posts - 71 votes Speaks: Russian*, English
| Message 11 of 31 13 November 2015 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
I would say that Russian "Щ" (as in "Щастье!") is akin to English "sh" (only we don't protrude our lips forward), and
Russian "Ш" is a "darker", velarized counterpart of "Щ".
"TS" ("Ц") is an affricate. If "t" and "sh" merge into "ch" sound in English, then "т" and "s" merge into "ц" sound in
Russian.
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jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6706 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map
| Message 12 of 31 14 November 2015 at 7:10pm | IP Logged |
CitizenJimserac wrote:
For example the word for heart, which in PinYin is XIN, to me sounds like (phonetically) "sheen". |
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Yeah, that's what I meant. The sound that is spelled x in pinyin (e.g. xin/heart) matches the sound of Щ (a single sound!), and the sound of sh (e.g. Shanghai) is the same as ш.
And the latter is indeed more retroflex, that's the main difference.
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vell Newbie United States Joined 3590 days ago 17 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian
| Message 13 of 31 17 November 2015 at 5:12am | IP Logged |
The New Penguin Russian Course is probably the single best resource for
beginner/intermediate Russian page for page (if you disregard the phonetics).
This for phonetics: http://www.study-languages-online.com/pronunciation.html
The articulation diagrams are particularly useful.
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6394 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 14 of 31 17 November 2015 at 7:27pm | IP Logged |
couldn't resist :)
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jeff_fontaine Newbie Canada learnlanguageso Joined 3099 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Studies: Portuguese
| Message 15 of 31 17 November 2015 at 10:30pm | IP Logged |
Native speaker of French here. My suggestion is to try to immerse your self in Cyrillic (at the same time, Russian) as much as possible. This is something you should do only if you can afford the extra time it will take you to decipher/translate the language which will probably be very unfamiliar to you at the beginning. But at time goes by, you should get more and more familiar due to exposure.
If you're okay with the time investment, then do things like changing the language of the operating system of your computer and your mobile devices to Russian. That should help you a lot!
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CitizenJimserac Newbie United States Joined 3118 days ago 13 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Russian
| Message 16 of 31 17 November 2015 at 10:50pm | IP Logged |
Well yes, immersion helps, but if I may suggest what got me over the Cyrillic hurdle with no problem, it was looking
at sentences with lots of cognates.
The tank is here, the bank is there, here is the photograph...that sort of thing for a few hours and then on to more
advanced stuff. Nice simple Russian words, like "Wolf", "dog", "house" and then short sentences to get started and
you're on your way.
Really, with Russian, the alphabet is the least of the problems, the main thing is to have good instructions on the
verbs, and to get used to using the cases and declensions.
And of course reading things of interest, in my case it was Chess, is of enormous help exactly as Siomotteikiru (or
Buonaparte says in their superb L-R methodology. PS: Anyone have contact info for this legendary person ?)
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