Quote Originally Posted by zedeeyen View Post
...And do you know what will happen if you include an in-depth explanation of palatalization in your beginner textbook? No one will buy it, they'll buy the one that teaches them how to stumble successfully through a simple conversation, because that's all they want to be able to do!
I disagree with this because: it is very easy in two pages with accompanying audio, to give a very good introduction to hard/soft consonant pairs with appropriate vowels. The student simply listens and reads the pairs. Then they are introduced to the topic right away, and even though it isn't going to fix all the problems that show up, they will have a simple early set of examples to refer back to. Even the textbook by the American Lipson does this on pages seven and eight of his introductory text ( the student has just learned Cyrillic letters) to make sure student knows that palatalization/soft consonants must be attended to. The audio is by a native Russian speaker, so no mistakes. He also includes the distinctions of the four possibilities as mentioned in the table by Боб Уайтман with various consonants. This is just the first intro to hard soft pairs, but it is still in the first few pages. Just a few pages later, are soft consonants at ends of words.


The concept is easy to package in small introductory first lessons. But must have audio.