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0:05
okay well um then i guess i'll get started introduce myself so hi like liam said uh my name is morgan i graduated in 2019 i was a double major in russian studies and applied linguistics so it's kind of what got me sort of like fixated on phonetics with russian early on i'm not an expert so if i say anything and you're like that's not right tell me yeah i did the capstone year after graduation um and here we are um i'm melissa um like leona and morgan i graduated in 2019.
0:40
um what else um after graduation i moved to russia and i'm trying to get back as soon as possible um so yes like leanna and morgan um the process the journey with russian pronunciation has been um a fun one um and today so i guess we're just going to talk a little bit about things that helped us mostly on our journeys so i think we can get started yeah okay so my slide um i remember when i first started learning about phonetics and how to pronounce certain words i got really
1:23
frustrated and i use the past tense even though i still get frustrated sometimes but that's part of the learning process um i remember learning when i was studying abroad in kazakhstan my funny enough my little host sister who was like seven she cause i at one point got frustrated with trying to pronounce a word and she told me that she was like well your mouth is shaped differently of course i had to kind of translate what she was saying sometimes but um it kind of occurred to me that okay okay
1:56
she's on to something and sure enough i googled it the best you know uh way to find something out i googled it and in fact our mouths are physically shaped like a physical difference in shape based on our native language so our palette is formed in a way to produce english sounds um english sounds with our english palette um so russians have a different physically different palette so us trying to pronounce russian sounds with an english palette is just very difficult and that's not
2:31
something i really gave myself credit for but realized i had to overcome or at least try to counteract um so understanding these phonetic concepts and sort of where to place your tongue to protect to pronounce certain sounds was very crucial is very crucial to improving your pronunciation and understanding maybe why you're having difficulties producing certain sounds um leona and morgan can attest i i don't know why phonetics just was not my strong suit and we in kazakhstan during the
3:09
um flagship summer abroad we have a class all about phonetics and if you've ever taken a class about it or focused on it um they have you sort of writing transcriptions and showing you when to pronounce certain sounds when to devoice certain sounds and i just it just didn't click with me um so i'm so i'm now i've been learning in russian for about six years and it's just hitting me now so if this is something that's foreign to you or you're just not getting the hang of um
3:43
going back to the basics is like the best possible way to sort of moving forward apply that new knowledge to produce the correct sounds so next slide okay so this uh diagram here kind of talks about all the different parts of the mouse and the sort of like vocal structure that exists it's a lot you don't really need to focus on all of it um most of the sounds that we're going to talk about today are um mainly formed and the only like places you really need to know about are the alveolar rays
4:19
the palette the tongue and the teeth so um if you want to turn your cameras off and like follow what i'm talking about per second feel free you don't have to but um it's kind of important to know what the alveolar ridge is so if you feel in the roof your mouth with your tongue if your hands clean um there's kind of a little bump right before your teeth so it's like the shape is kind of like curved and then there's a bump and then there's your teeth that is the alveolar ridge that's where
4:43
a lot of sounds tend to be produced or we think they should be pronounced produced um and then the palette is kind of the roof of your mouth and then everybody knows what the tongue and the teeth are
4:55
right so talking talking a bit about the concepts that you learn in classes but also that will help you improve your pronunciation um again i actually at the very beginning of the pandemic i i wanted to improve my pronunciation so i thought i have way too much time on my hands now let's go back to basics so i downloaded i printed out this like 80 page guide and i have a link to it later all about the russian sound system and of course one of the first things
5:27
that you learn about with phonetics and russian is hard and soft indicating vowels so as you can see on the right there's our chart hard vowels soft vowels but not only are they inherently hard inherently soft they also they affect consonants so they do that by affecting the consonants that come before it so if you have a consonant and then a hard vowel like
5:56
then the consonant before it is pronounced as a hard consonant similarly if it's a soft consonant or sorry a soft vowel the consonant that precedes it is pronounced soft as well so this is one instance of how vowels can change a consonant's pronunciation um leona if you could take me to the next slide here are a few other ways that consonants can be determined as hard or soft so as you can see number one for both sides when the vowel after it affects it um also number two you might have noticed
6:37
we have hard signs and soft signs in russia in russian um so those indicate the softness or hardness of the consonant before it um also if you have two consonants together next to one another then the conch the first consonant takes the hardness or softness of the consonant after it and of course that consonant takes the hardness or softness of the vowel before it so we realized it's like sentence structure in russian where we learned that the most important piece is always at the end
7:12
at the end of the syllabic structure boom right so as you can see in you know a very common word this d sound is pronounced hard it's not zva right it's the va and similarly with the soft consonants so the is a soft vowel so the ye affects the m which becomes soft and that because that's a soft consonant that's before another consonant the first v is soft so
7:55
consonants are also hard when they are at the end of a word so for example the russian word for let's say step yeah shock shock it's not it's spelled but the is at the end so not it's pronounced hard like a cup and then as you might have already learned we have these consonants that are always hard or always soft so no matter what vowels are after them or if there's another consonant after them i don't know of any specific words but they are regardless of what follows them they're always hard
8:36
but they're always soft yes next slide please okay yes so palatalization this is a little bit more like linguistic-y um so a vowel is soft that means it's been palatalized um i think that's supposed to say the letter itself it's been palatalized but it's fine um so if you have a soft consonant the tip of your tongue moves backwards essentially what's important to know here is that if it's been palatalized the sound is being produced more in the center of the mouth than it would be typically
9:10
so that's going to mean different things for different letters um but that's just kind of a general concept that can be useful to refer back to if you're like oh god i don't know how to make this letter soft i really want to pronounce it right just think center of the mouth and that's one way to try to get there and sort of just piggybacking off that i actually i remember um professor padilla told me during a class or not me us during a class one time if you're having
9:36
trouble pronouncing the soft l that if you make a sort of a y sound like a yeah it can often if it's very quick it can often sound very close to a soft l so i still use that professor fedema um now now i'm talking about voiced consonants and unvoiced consonants so a new concept um voiced consonants are those which we use our vocal cords to produce so as you see on the right you can feel it when you say it when you pronounce it whereas unvoiced consonants do not so
10:19
so there's no vocal cord vibration however these can be changed right so voiced consonants can become unvoiced and unvoiced consonants can be produced as voiced in these situations so for example we have gupka after loshka so you'll notice the b in the first one because this is after it and that is unvoiced the b that's normally voiced becomes unvoiced and the b the book
11:19
similarly unvoiced consonants become voiced when they are before a voiced consonant right not food not football football so the d the t becomes soft like a d it's not vac song because the z z is voiced so the k becomes voiced as well and it's like a vag-zol vag-zol sounds like a g and it's not steal it it's this sounds like a z steal it steal it
12:02
okay notation this is another sort of uh similar concept to palatalization actually it is kind of capitalization but yotation is when a sound is affected by it it's a j is what it looks like in english but a j at the phoneme is essentially a u sound it's kind of like that y that most was talking about or you might have also seen it often times we refer to it in like russian classes as typically what is doing is actually indicating notation so um one example of this and i don't
12:32
have it on the slide is so we talk about ah yah how odd is the same
12:41
there are certain vowels that are always rotated which is and what that means phonetically is that it's essentially palatalized so if you think about yaw when you start that sound you're more in the center of your mouth you're like you're you and then you're off where you get whiter so that's kind of how to conceptualize that and as such most soft letters are actually yotated or palatalized so when you're recreating a soft sound like i already said think about the center of your mouth and
13:11
then of course there's a slight disclaimer that not all soft letters are yotated it's specific to labial dental and velar consonants if you want to talk about that more hit me up but that's yeah that's just kind of a more of a nitpicky detail problem letters we all have them we hear about them we pronounce them wrong um starting with this one and e um i distinctly remember being in class and just back and forth with uh i think both professor kodima and professor krezen going and just being
13:46
like no it's so wrong but not really understanding what the difference is so essentially the difference is when you pronounce an e which is very similar to like a um i think an american e sound you've got the tip of your tongue placed by the bottom of the teeth and the center of the tongue is high and rounded so that's very easy it's just e but then when you pronounce uh you're just taking that shape and shifting it further back in the mouth so it's just moving everything backwards
14:14
a little bit and once again if you want to like turn your sound off and just like mutter it to yourself go for it i find that really helpful um but yeah that's an e um soft versus hard in pronunciation so disclaimer number one as we already know these are not the only consonants that are soft or hard but they're one of they're some of the more noticeable ones um especially when americans try to reproduce them and while we're using in these examples the soft sign to delineate this is not
14:42
the only time they're soft or hard refer back to melissa's side slide on that to kind of go over those specific conditions all right so hard l and soft l so when you have a hard l the tip of the tongue is placed directly behind the teeth and the center of the tongue is high so that's like right on that alveolar ridge i was talking about on that bump that's where your tongue is but when you pronounce the soft l your tongue is moving further back so you've got oh and everything's just
15:10
shifting backwards like i said it's kind of like palatalization because you're moving more towards the center of your mouth hard tea and soft tea this is actually kind of different it's not really palatalization it's more based on a i might just forget about it aspiration that's what it's called um it's based on sort of aspiration so and hard t is where the front part of the tongue is pressed against the upper teeth and the back part of the tongue dips so a soft t is the tip of the tongue
15:40
pressed against the lower t and the front part of the tongue so not the tip but the front part is pressed against the upper teeth and what the biggest noticeable difference in sound is is at the end of a soft t you'll hear a little like hiss so versus and that's really difficult for americans to hear because in american english we don't differentiate between those two sounds they mean the same thing for us so a lot of times you won't be able to hear that until you really retrain your ear
16:10
but if you know how to reproduce that at least you'll be able to when you speak kind of get that more correctly even if it takes you more time to train your ear to be able to hear the difference and then these last couple ones aren't necessarily from what my experiences have been they aren't the most noticeable things um they like no one's gonna be like aha it's an american just because you kind of pronounce these things fanatic or like internally wrong but they do make a difference
16:37
so you've got the ruski souza and you've got the american sz so you're going to have the texture of your tongue behind the bottom teeth i didn't know this or i forgot about this until i was in kazakhstan for the capstone year and the phonologist like every single week was like you're pronouncing it wrong you put your tongue is in the wrong place and like she was right um and then because an american s z your tongue is back at that alveolar ridge so you're used to pronouncing or at
17:06
least i'm used to pronouncing it like says uh and then i would always like default back to that when i just see so the good to know then we've got of uh and an american buffalo i can't pronounce the russian one so the a russian buffa is pronounced between the two lips so that's the all of the vibration and the affrication is happening just between your lips whereas with an american english vp vf you're printing it between your teeth and your uh bottom lip so i'm used to pronouncing it buffer and
17:43
every time i try to do the bilabial one it's just it doesn't work for me i hope it works better for the rest of you
17:53
okay so i haven't done as much deep study into phonetics that morgan has done academically and melissa on her own but a fun way to practice some of these sounds is using different russian tongue twisters so you can find a ton online in russian it's kagovorki but yeah we won't make all of you do this today i will just um do a practice or embarrass myself for you all but just as an example this is a fun tongue twister that uses um the or helps you practice the uh and e sounds so mama
18:34
mama mila milo mill mila milan yubila um yeah it's kind of fun
18:46
oh i actually remembered something that we didn't put in the slides but um just like a side note um for vowels specifically especially vowels that are produced for the back of the mouth if you're from california um they're going to be harder to produce correctly because in california there's been a sort of vowel shift more front into the front of the mouth over the past few decades so it is genuinely harder to hear and produce things that are supposed to be in the back of the mouth so if you
19:16
struggle with that and you feel a bit down about it it's not your fault it's just where you're from all right so uh a few resources that um we found helpful um uh okay so the first one is it has the russian alphabet and sounds specifically it takes letters consonants and it has it side by side the pronunciation of soft and hard so that was really helpful for me i spent many an hour just going between the two and repeating it until it sounded even remotely similar
19:56
um the second one articulation details um if i'm not mistaken this also yes so it gives you an audio sample for it tells you hard or soft and then it also shows a diagram much like morgan's diagrams in this presentation of where your tongue should be placed generally and then it also has a little bit of a description so for example i'm looking at the first one which is ah and it has the audio sample a picture transcription and then the description says the mouth is wide open the lips are
20:36
relaxed the tip of the tongue is against the lower teeth so it gives you as much information as possible to help you form your mouth correctly to pronounce these sounds to produce these sounds the third one this is i mentioned this a little bit earlier this is my very large guide so maybe i don't know save the planet and don't print it out like me um but it goes step by step through all these phonetic concepts and if you're further along in your studies of russian i still
21:10
recommend going back it was really helpful for me to kind of go back to basics and you know these words that i had always had trouble producing because i told myself you're back go back to phonetics later you'll figure this out later so upon going back and figuring out how to produce them correctly where to put my tongue how to where my lips should be helped me figure out these problems they also have um you can see in the hyperlink there are audio files with it
21:41
so it's a very comprehensive guide super helpful um and then of course you know instagram um there's a bun there's a ton of russian learning instagrams you can follow um for with different functions if you want to learn like words of the day grammar concepts um one that i found about pronunciation in particular who was really helpful was this uh this girl named kira this woman named kira um and this is a link to her instagram and she does sort of mini dives into
22:15
letters specifically how to form how to form shape your mouth to produce the sounds and then certain words like trouble words um that you might also have um problems with so she helps guide you through those as well um so yeah i think i think that's about it yeah so we will include those resources when we post this event on the website and you can also send them to you i think we gave you all a lot of information so don't want anyone to be overwhelmed i think even
22:53
just focusing on the placement and things like that even just on one sound at a time or one letter or just one concept just trying to focus on one thing at a time would still be really helpful with your language um so yeah melissa and morgan thank you so much for sharing with us um i'm gonna
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