Quote Originally Posted by Soft sign View Post
Yes.

What did you use for «лью» then?
/l'ju/, I think, with an apostrophe for the мягкий знак. Of course, it didn't really matter much, at least in the first year or so of Russian, because none of us could really "hear the difference" between "лю", "лью", and "лъю". So the difference in spelling seemed rather artificial, until we learned to understand the phonetic differences.

P.S. In my first two years of college Russian, the emphasis was mainly on grammar and vocabulary -- the professors explained the difference between "hard" and "soft" consonants, but they didn't worry too much about our pronunciation. It was only in the 3rd year that we had a native-speaking woman who worked very hard to explain Russian phonetics to us -- hours and hours of "ла-ла-ла, ля-ля-ля, му-му-му, мю-мю-мю", and so on, with diagrams like this:

midsagittal_bw.jpg