Thread: Confused about soft vowels

Originally Posted by Marcus

I wonder why many textbooks fail to explain that.

Most anglo beginners will struggle to hear or even understand the distinctions between soft and hard consonants, let alone be able to reproduce them, and in the meantime explaining "ся" as "s + ya" gives a good enough approximation of the correct sound to get by on.

Originally Posted by zedeeyen

Most anglo beginners will struggle to hear or even understand the distinctions between soft and hard consonants, let alone be able to reproduce them, and in the meantime explaining "ся" as "s + ya" gives a good enough approximation of the correct sound to get by on.

No, it doesn't. It is absolutely wrong. Sya and ся are as similar as w and v in English. If it is difficult to hear and understand, it must be properly explained and emphasized.
These are all PHONEMIC distinctions which are represented by Russian orthography. When we studied English, we used to write phonemic transcriptions in the IPA. We did not hear the difference between many English sounds, especially vowels, but we were taught that there were different sounds.
Replacing soft consonants with a consonant + yot is not an approximation at all for a Russian ear. Saying lya instead of ля is worse than saying la with hard L. Georgian accent with their нэт sounds better. Such explanations do not allow to understand the meaning of the disjunctive signs, how to pronounce soft consonants at the end of a syllable, give wrong and simulteniously difficult pronunciation.
In this case it is really better to pronounce са in reflexive verbs because such pronunciation exists.
And it is very difficult to correct then, because the pronunciation must be established at the first stages of language learning and because people say: "It was written in textbooks".
It is a comon mistake made by anglophones to say a consonant + y instead of a soft consonant, because to an untrained English ear it can sometimes really sound like that. But textbooks should pay attention at it and say that students should avoid this pronunciation.
The words лёд and льёт differ by the presence of this "y" sound, they are [l'ot] and [l'jot]. Do you know how Russians pronounce the word "word"? вёрд. Does it sound similar? No. But that's how "nyedyelya" sounds to a Russian, with the same degree of accuracy.