Quote Originally Posted by Боб Уайтман View Post
[*]Does an "average" English speaker really hear the sound "ay" to rhyme with the Russian "э/е" or they just use this rhyme because the English [ɛ] (as in "bed") never occurs word-finally?
Excellent questions, Боб! In my "mnemonic", I took some liberties with the rhymes/pronunciations for exactly the reason you guessed: because the [ɛ] doesn't occur as the final syllable of any English words. (Except for a couple of interjections, which I'll come to below.)

But, of course, the main intention of this mnemonic was not to teach correct pronunciation, but to introduce English-speaking students of Russian to the alien (for us!) concepts of "noun declension" and падежи.

Do English speakers "hear" the second element (glide) of the diphthong "ay" in their speech? To my ears, this glide is the main thing which makes "met" and "mate" sound differently.
Probably not, because this diphthong is quite often treated as though it were a "pure" vowel sound when children are learning about phonics in school. And at least in the US, dictionaries have traditionally used māt (that is, one vowel with a macron) instead of meɪt (that is, with a diphthong) to show the pronunciation of "mate". On the other hand, English speakers who've studied foreign languages, and perhaps also professionally trained singers, might be more conscious of the fact that the so-called "long a" (ā) is really a diphthong with two distinct vowel sounds.


The most interesting question: would an "average" English speaker hear the difference between Russian "все" and "всей", "уже" and "ужей" (genitive plural of "уж") etc.? If yes, how would they describe the difference?
I think an average English speaker would have absolutely no trouble hearing the difference between "все" and "всей". They'd describe the second one as rhyming with "play", and the first one as rhyming with the interjections "feh!" or "meh!" (Both of these basically express scorn/dislike but "feh" was borrowed directly from Yiddish, while "meh" was popularized by The Simpsons.)

However, I would expect that an English speaker learning to speak Russian would, at first, often mispronounce все and уже as though they were saying всей and ужей. And the reason is simply that (except for "feh" and "meh") our tongues aren't accustomed to saying the [ɛ] vowel at the end of a word.