Thread: ъ and ь

I agree with Geoduck (because I actually understand what he is saying, wheras the rest of you evidently don't).

Yes, of course Мать and Мат sound different and distinct, no-one has said otherwise, but the fact is that any learner [looks at Tatu] who spends more than five seconds worrying about that difference (or the difference between и and ы, or щ and ш, or any other of the reccuring themes in the Pronunciation forum) in the initial stages of study are simply wasting their own time. It's totally pointless.

The reason is, you categorically aren't going to sound like anything other than a foreigner and a beginner until you have spoken and listened to natives for a considerable amount of time anyway. For your first unpteen thousand conversations you are going to be a stammering idiot who can't get his declensions right, muddles up his conjugations, constantly forgets words, misunderstands questions directed at himself, etc etc. How accurate your accent is simply isn't going to be an issue. You are much better to get your pronunciation sort-of-right, then spend your finite time doing something that will actually make a difference to how comprehesible you are, such as reading, practicing sentence formation, conversing with a fluent speaker, listening to Russian radio or watching Russian films, and so on.

Russians aren't stupid (no more stupid than anyone else anyway), and no Russian is ever going to hold a missplaced hard consononant against you, or stare blankly for more than two seconds should you mistakenly ask for manhole soup instead of onion.

And by the time you do reach a stage where your grasp of grammar and vocabularly are such that you can carry a normal conversation without making regular mistakes or pauses for translation, by then the difference between hard and soft consonants will be as natural to you as it is to natives.

That's if you ever reach that stage.

Originally Posted by scotcher

Yes, of course Мать and Мат sound different and distinct, no-one has said otherwise, but the fact is that any learner [looks at Tatu] who spends more than five seconds worrying about that difference (or the difference between и and ы, or щ and ш, or any other of the reccuring themes in the Pronunciation forum) in the initial stages of study are simply wasting their own time. It's totally pointless.
ask for manhole soup instead of onion.

I have been learning for almost two years. And I am interested in phonetics.

I know that Tatu, but that doesn't make what Geoduck said any less true.

You are indeed interested in phonetics and the theory of the language, and that's laudable enough in itself (I was only pulling your leg when I poked fun at you), but if you think that all the time you've spent agonising over your pronunciation has made the slightest difference to your ability to impart information in a proper conversation then you are deluding yourself. Either way though, I would guess that most learners' first priority isn't memorising the theory, it's simply improving their ability to communicate, whatever that may entail, and that's something that isn't affected in the slightest by whether or not they can pronounce the difference between Мать and Мат.

Which is, I think, all that Geoduck was trying to say.

scotcher, obviously you've never had the opportunity to call Microsoft (et al.) tech support and end up connected to somebody in India who's been speaking English for 20 years and still you have to ask him to repeat, spell, etc. in order to get the meaning across. Pronunciation is nothing to slough off.

Chaika, I totally agree, pronunciation is nothing to slough off.

Though in your case I'd suggest you should concentrate more on your English reading comprehension skills, since they are evidently somewhat lacking.

Originally Posted by Geoduck

I could really care less if someone wants to say "zat", because I can understand it just fine.

Oh, well... I've got a "day time" key-card. Sometimes, once a 2-3 months I need to come to work at night. First time I needed that I asked my supervisor, who has "all time" card, whether he could borrow me his card. It took him several minutes to understand that I was asking him for a card, not for a car, and me to understand why borrowing what I was asking for was such a problem.

I've been living in US for 6 years now, I knew English much better than majority of Russian immigrants to begin with and my accent is slighter than accent of 60-70% of us.

It does matter.

Originally Posted by Vesh

Originally Posted by Geoduck

I could really care less if someone wants to say "zat", because I can understand it just fine.

Oh, well... I've got a "day time" key-card. Sometimes, once a 2-3 months I need to come to work at night. First time I needed that I asked my supervisor whether he could borrow me his card. It took him several minutes to understand that I was asking him for a card, not for a car, and me to understand why borrowing what I was asking for was such a problem.

I've been living in US for 6 years now, I knew English much better than majority of Russian immigrants to begin with and my accent is slighter than accent of 60-70% of us.

It does matter.

Sorry, maybe you already know this.

But you can't say "borrow me a card", it's "lend me a card".

Originally Posted by TATY

Originally Posted by Vesh

Originally Posted by Geoduck

I could really care less if someone wants to say "zat", because I can understand it just fine.

Oh, well... I've got a "day time" key-card. Sometimes, once a 2-3 months I need to come to work at night. First time I needed that I asked my supervisor whether he could borrow me his card. It took him several minutes to understand that I was asking him for a card, not for a car, and me to understand why borrowing what I was asking for was such a problem.

I've been living in US for 6 years now, I knew English much better than majority of Russian immigrants to begin with and my accent is slighter than accent of 60-70% of us.

It does matter.

Sorry, maybe you already know this.

But you can't say "borrow me a card", it's "lend me a card".

Thank you.

Yep, I know. But I always mix up these 2 words.