Quote Originally Posted by paulb
I can only apologize for my imperfect knowledge of non-american Englishes. I've taught classes on pronunciation here in the US and my current work involves evaluating speech by non-native speakers, so pronunciation issues are on my mind a lot. I just don't always know when some pronunciation issue is specific to american English.

I'll just point out, though, that this *did you-->didja* phenomenon is (within American English) not an isolated instance, but a consistent feature. See, if you ever get the chance, the discussion in Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin pp. 157-172. This particular phenomenon is called palatalization and occurs any time s, z, t, or d are followed by y in an unstressed syllable.
Firstly, you must understand that most people in the world are actually taught British English in schools (this includes Russia) and I know that Olya is learning British English.

Secondly, these sort of pronunciations like 'did you' --> didya is almost non-standard, like going to --> gonna and I'm not sure how appropriate or necessary it is to teach them to non-native speakers. I don't think this sort of thing really concerns learners on a more basic level, I'd only think it'd be useful to those who are learning about English pronunciation / dialects on a higher level. Because basically in everyday speech a very large part of what we say is slurred / contracted / etc.

Also since this is a Russian language forum and we are Russian learners / speakers here, I don't think you need to explain what palatisation is, considering Russian exhibits one of the greatest degrees of palatisation of any language.

So I'm not saying your point wasn't valid, more that it wasn't necessary and was more likely to cause confusion then help Olya.

Furthermore, didja (where J is an English J sound like in jar) is not palatisation technically. English has a tendency for palatisation to slip to a hard consonant.

E.g. did + ya = didya (with a palatised d (дь)) However this tends to becomes dijja (диджа).

This is best demonstrated in British English.
American English pronounces the U in words like tube, dune, due, tuesday, tune as 'oo', i.e. toob, doon, doo, toosday, toon.

British English pronounces this U like 'yoo' so in good clear pronunciation you get 'tyoob', 'dyoo', 'tyoosday', 'tyoon' etc. However it's natural for English speakers for the palatised T and D to become Ch and J. So general most common (southern) British English pronunciations are
tube = "choob"
tune = "choon"
tuesday = "choosday"
due = "joo" (pronounced the same as the word Jew).
dune = 'joon' (pronounced the same as June).
etc.