Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
But what for should Englishmen replace a soft consonant with a hard consonant and a "y", if it doesn't make a sound closer to the Russian one, but makes the pronunciation more difficult?
It does make the sound closer though. It doesn't make it correct, but it is closer. Ask any English speaker to say "nyet" and what you hear will be a lot closer to "нет" than if you'd asked him to say "net". You can stamp your feet and insist that it's wrong all you like, but for most people it's good enough to be going on with, until such times as they've heard how the locals pronounce it.

Wrong pronunciation is a bad habbit which is hard to correct.
If you learn it at the beginning, it will become natural and you will learn everything in the correct pronunciation.
That's just a bald assertion. It doesn't match my own experience at all, but more importantly it clearly doesn't match the professional experience of the people who write beginner Russian books for English speakers (which is what we're discussing here), else they'd put more emphasis on pronunciation and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Why do you think that conjugations and declensions are important? Я жить Москва is perfectly understandable.
In that example and many others it's not important, but in most cases it is. That's simply not the case for softness. There are no examples, or vanishingly few, where a slight mispronunciation of the softness of a consonant in an otherwise correct sentence can lead to ambiguity or confusion.

Should Russians train to pronounce voiced consonants in the word-final positions? Can't it be understood from the context that dick is dig?
Not always, obviously, because "dick" and "dig" are different words and are distinguishable only by the final consonant. That's precisely the point. Which pairs of words in Russian are distinguishable only by the softness of a consonant?