I still can't pin point the difference between soft and hard. I can hear some slight difference but I wish there was more explanation on how to pronounce them.
If you're talking about hard and soft letters, then It deals with the position of your tongue in your mouth. When it comes to the differences between soft and hard signs, then they don't have any sounds.
In English, we also have hard and soft consonants too but we just learn it from our parents naturally even though we never learn about this distinction. Just say "tick tock" and notice the difference between the 't' in each work. The 't' in 'tick' is a soft 't' while the 't' in 'tock' is a hard 't'. The vowel following a consonant determines whether it's hard and soft.
I really appreciate your videos explaining Russian phonology and use of language. You really make it accessible. I have a PhD in Linguistics and find your videos to be the best I've seen in terms of really explaining the nuances of Russian. Thank you!
I am fascinated by the russian language and started learning to speak better with family and a love interest. I started with duolingo and Rosetta and while they are helpful they are really "to the book" and just throws random phrases at you and sometimes its difficult to retain information without creating your own learning regimen along with it. Ive found your videos to be EXTREMELY helpful. Everytime im stuck in a concept I search it on your channel and find the answers. You are a great teacher thank you!
can you please make an example using soft sign, hard sign and no sign in the same word? I would like to hear how a word would sound in each case, thank you for all you do.
Спасибо! I've been studying Russian for the past months and could not get the language without the lessons you've been posting! Very useful and didactic!
It sometimes seems to me that the letter “ь” is a more short version of the letter “й”, and the letter “Ъ” is a more short version of the letter “ы” (very short that it cannot be pronounced without a consonant)
@@ScisaacFisaac Sorry, I didn’t understand what you wrote)) The fact is that I am Russian and I decided to write this "advice" for English speakers (and wrote it through Google translate) =) I’m saying words with a hard and soft sign and I understand that in fact I say the letters “И” and “Ы”, only very very short))) I don’t know how much I’m right, but I watched the phonetic transcription and it seems to me that I’m right in the long run (of course there are more intermediate sounds that we don’t even realize when pronouncing, but still, in general, I think it is)
ФИДОРЪ - Thanks for this. I watch every video I can find on the subject of the Jers. I would like to see you do a tutorial on the concept of Palitalization in the RU language... which to me is the most fascinating thing distinguishing Russian from other Slavic languages (e.g. Bulgarian, Polish.) Миръ Всѣмъ -- КИРИЛЛЪ
I spent time teaching myself the Cyrillic alphabet casually, while listening to Russian music and visiting Russian stores. Just experimenting with this particular language. For the most part, pronunciation makes sense. I can figure out how to pronounce most words, even though I'm not conversational. (Again, just experimenting for a hobby. I love languages.) But this was the hardest part for me. This was the one thing (two?) I had to finally look up. Thanks for helping! It adds a puzzle piece, but I think there's more here for me to eventually understand.
the way you pronounce salt in Russian, is exactly how in Spanish, we say sun, and salt would be, sal, with an A sound in the middle. This double sound with signs is still a bit complicated for me to get, but this video was short and easy to understand; it helped out a lot. It kinda reminds me of English contractions where cannot and can't sound different but both words are used in sentences and have the same meaning.
You can sorta think of the softened "ль" as the Spanish "ll", or the pronunciation of "L" when there's a high vowel (like "i" or "e") after it instead of nothing or the low vowel like "o" or "u".
I’m still not quite sure as to whether you should put a ъ or a ь. For example, семья: I understand it makes the last letter “ya” and and not “a” but if there were a hard sign there, it would still make “ya” and not “a”. I’m just trying to understand completely to improve my Russian :) спасибо!!😊
I think what they are asking is that both signs separate a consonant from a y-vowel. So which one do you use in which situation? I believe it has to do with the consonant (some are hard and some are soft). But I’m not 100% sure.
Thanks so much for this video, I've been trying to figure out what the soft and hard sign do for weeks. I will say to my stupid English-speaking ears, the signs don't seem to affect the consonant sound but the vowel before the consonant! But at least now I know what I'm listening for :) Thanks again.
Thanks soo much! I randomly took to learning the russian alphabet and this is the one thing i couldnt find a clear explanation for, you did so very clearly. only could you maybe come with more examples for the hard sign?
Oh god, that was so helpful - I'm self teaching and neither of my (extraordinarily helpful but unused to teaching their language) native speakers could find a way to explain these two diacritic notations to me in a way that I understood. So, for the softened л, it sounds a bit like you're rounding and aspirating the л, is that a fair description?
Notice that even in English there are two different sounds for the letter "L" depending on its context, but this difference is usually being ignored (the two soundings are treated as the same, they're what linguists call _allophones_ ): When you say "lot" or "load", the "L" sound sounds dull and "deep in your mouth". But when there's a high vowel after it, such as "i", then you pronounce it "softer", more "in front of your mouth", like in the words "litter" or "leeway" (linguists call them _palatalized_ because the tongue is moving closer to the palate). The same phenomenon happens in Russian: when there's a high vowel after the consonant, it automatically makes it sound softer. Sometimes this is not what we want, and we need something to indicate that to the reader, and this something is the hard sign "ъ". It separates the following high vowel (like я,е,ю,ё) from the preceding consonant so that it can still sound hard instead of blending with the vowel and sounding soft. The other time we want the consonant to sound soft (it's usually the case with "л"), but we don't have to attach any unnecessary high vowels to make it naturally soft. And there the soft sign "ь" comes in. It tells you that you have to pronounce the letter as the soft sound instead of the default hard one, but without messing with the word by introducing any extra vowels that normally shouldn't be there.
When I started learning the Russian alphabet, I found out from other RU-vidrs that the the Russian names for the soft sign ь and hard sign ъ are мягкий знак and твёрдый знак respectively.
In IX-XII cc. that two symbols are had pronouncing. "Ь" was short nosal [e], "Ъ" was short nosal [o]. Now, write and read some Russian words with old pronouncing: печь, пью, лъбъ, боль, тылъ... Live with it.
So useful! Thanks. I started learning Russian last week on Memrise and that b symbol was confusing me. Also the T in the Russian word for 'happy', which I would be able to write, but my Russian keyboard conversion stickers haven't arrived in the post yet! Anyway, I will click the subscribe button after writing this
In the old pre-1918 spelling, words with final consonants that were not followed by a soft sign were followed by a hard sign, e.g., садъ, онъ, even въ. In the 19th century the (excellent) point was made that the hard sign was superfluous: an always-hard consonant would always be hard anyway and an always-soft consonant would be soft anyway. For consonants that can be either hard or soft, it was sufficient to have only a soft sign, and a hard final consonant would have a zero-ending. This change was resisted by conservatives, but was instituted by the Bolshevik government after the Revolution. Overnight, the ъ went from being one of the most used letters in Russian to being one of the least used. Today it is used only as a separation sign, e. g., объехать. It doesn't affect pronunciation; it's retained to keep Russian spelling rules consistent.
I honestly think the biggest problem I had was that EVERYBODY sold me the consonant sound changes, I finally figured out that it doesn't. Ъ just implies to fully pronounce the consonant and ь essentially adds a vowel sound, usually like 'yeah'
The frustrating thing is that I can understand the pronunciation difference between the R's, but I can't manage to pronounce either of them correctly. I think I'll come back to this video every now and then until I get it.
Fyodor - Soft sounds cause lots of problems for English speakers. Here is a simplified version of how I see them: The soft sound basically is a y: ye, yo, ya, yu. When consonants are involved it becomes harder but, I think Russian pronunciation is actually consistent. So some thoughts: D soft or followed by soft vowel = dj T soft or followed by soft vowel = tch L soft or followed by soft vowel = ly but the y is very weak Does that make sense?
All right, but: T soft isn't - tch Try to say the word - "Beaty". "ty" should be very short, but you should hear it. D soft isn't - dj Try to say the word - "Daddy". "dy" should be very short, but you should hear it.
still so hard to make a pronunciation about "ь" , could you please post some more videos, regarding the issue? and please do talk slower when giving the examples of said topic, much appreciated,
The thing is when you have russian friends that you can learn russian vocabs from you might not even need this signs you just naturally memorize how exactly it was pronounced
Is there another video that deals with how to pronounce the alphabet with the hard and soft sign? I know it has to do with the tongue's position but hoping that there is a video that clarifies it? Havent been able to find a good video on that so far and ur videos are awesome!~
Судя по имени и коментарию на русском она как и я сюда попала из любопытства :))) П.С. мне нравится, что ты говоришь, что даже если человек не может что-то выговорить, то мы (русские) его поймём. Это внушает оптимизм в изучающих. Спасибо! П.С.С. я иногда смотрю подобные видео из любопытства. Интерессно узнать как иностранцам объясняют грамматику русского языка :)))))
I read that ь is used at the end of feminine nouns, and ъ was used to end masculine nouns before the script was simplified in 1918. Is that correct? Excellent video by the way. I wish my Russian was as good as your English.. большое спасибо
I'm learning how to use the Cyrillic alphabet for the purpose of World Building for my D&D setting. I have a lot of countries based on various Slavic languages (Polish and Czech, primarily), and something I wanted to do is to translate the names of my countries into the writing scripts they take inspiration from. While Polish and Czech use the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic, I still wanted to try to translate them phonetically from Latin into Cyrillic. I've done the same with my Eastern-Asian inspired countries as well as my Greek-Inspired ones. I even plan on learning a bit of Ogham so I can have my world's Dwarves use it as their writing system because of how well it thematically fits them. Here are the names for the Gods in these country's pantheon (their own names for the primary 12 gods of my world) that I've translated thusfar into Cyrillic: Эжка from Eżcha Чарнобо́г from Czarnobóg Конашка from Konaszka Anything I'm missing? I believe these are all phonetically correct.
Семья or Семя - both sound about the same to me. Does the word have to be pronounced that exact? Most Americans don't say English words exactly alike, yet everybody can understand each other.
