Quote Originally Posted by laxxy
the russian 'd', especially the soft 'd', is quite different from the English 'd'. It may be easier for you to imagine russian 'd' as a combination of 'd' and 'z', as it is often easier for English speakers to imagine soft consonants as if there were an extra short vowel following them. Webster even invented a special symbol (a superscript "y") for this, but no Russian can hear anything like that.

One interesting indication of it may be this: in Japanese, I very clearly hear their 'z' line sounds as 'dz'-s, and all Russian books on Japanese instruct to pronounce it as 'dz'. On the other hand, all English books I've seen just say that the Japanese 'z' is just "z like in zoo", which seems totally wrong to me. Our native language affects our sound recognition a great deal.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. I think it's just what you say. In normal conversation you'd never hear this "z" sound, but when it's really enunciated on the CD it sounds very prominent.

I think I got it now.

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