Thread: Confused about soft vowels

Originally Posted by Боб Уайтман

Just to make it clearer. There are 4 possibilities:

са [sa] - hard s + ah
ся [s^ja] - soft s + ah
съя [sja] - hard s + y + ah
сья [s^jja] - soft s + y + ah

The IPA symbol of [j] stands for the English "y" sound in "yes", [s^j] stands for the palatalized [s] (a single sound!).

All the four syllables above are pronounced differently.
But the difference between the latter two (съя and сья) is never used to distinguish between different words, although the difference is still noticeable.

I wonder why many textbooks fail to explain that.