Quote Originally Posted by zedeeyen View Post
Don't forget that English in Russia is a widespread academic subject which most learners begin in school, so beginner English texts in Russia are introductory-level academic works. In contrast, academic Russian is virtually unheard-of in anglo countries
That's a bit of an exaggeration. I think it's much closer to the truth to say that academic Russian at "pre-college" ages is virtually unheard of, at least in the States. I mean, the vast majority of public high-schools in the US offer only Spanish and perhaps French as a foreign-language, and Spanish is the only language that is likely to be taught (at a very basic level) in public elementary schools. So very very very few Americans entering a first-year college Russian course would have had ANY previous exposure to the language.

At the university level (in my own experience), Russian is taught in a highly structured and formalized way, utterly unlike the Pimsleur/Rosetta approach.

In my first-year course, the concepts of "hard" and "soft" consonants were introduced extremely early, at the same time as students are learning the alphabet, and about аканье, and about voiced/voiceless consonant pairs, etc. In other words, it was all presented as part of a systematic introduction to Cyrillic orthography.

Still, I didn't start to really "internalize" the principles of Russian pronunciation (in a non-abstract way) until my third year, partly because the focus for the first two years was overwhelmingly on written Russian and its grammar. (It was also partly because I was too lazy/busy to spend hours listening to audiotapes in the university "language lab" -- we weren't required to attend the lab; our course grades for the first two years were based almost entirely on written examinations, not oral ones; and I was double-majoring in Biology, so I had lots of other work to fill my time!)

I should add that some of the students in my first-year Russian class had no previous foreign-language study at all, and many had only studied Spanish or French, with their inflections that are overall much simpler than in Russian. (I had an advantage because in high school I'd studied Latin, which is even more heavily inflected than Russian -- so I was already painfully familiar with the concept of case-declension, for example.)

P.S. Even if I'd spent more time with the audiotapes, learning to pronounce the hard/soft consonants correctly would have still been an uphill climb for me, for the reason already pointed out by many people: these sounds aren't phonemically distinct in English, and the whole concept is a bit alien for us. But I might have learned it a little sooner.