Hi, everyone...

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I'm a Californian 15-year-old homeschooled high-school student (sophomore, I guess, although I'm on break), and I've been trying to learn Russian for a while now... still having problems with Cyrillic that discourage me when I try to get further in.

Basically, I went by the method of buying a Russian dictionary and a Russian grammar reference... and then looking stuff up online. It works okay (for me), but there are some things left unaddressed.

Mmkay. So I have two main questions:

The first is on the letter "Ы." How exactly is it pronounced? A number of websites I've visited say that it's 'somewhere between the u from put and the i from pit.' Which really doesn't make much sense to me at all. One thing that I've heard is that it's just like the i from pit... but then how does "ый" work?

The second question is on the aspect of the verb. None of the people I have (as of yet) spoken with about Russian are native speakers of English... so they can't really explain it. By the aspect, I mean the whole perfective/imperfective thing (i.e. the difference between прочитать and читать).

Any help here would be much appreciated.
Спасибо.

[EDIT: Thanks for your help, everyone. :)]

Comments

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Ohhh. Okay, that clarifies things... for lack of a better comparison, I'd say that it's kinda like the sound that the bouncing heads in Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" make. And if you have any idea what that is, you're cool.

[michellio.livejournal.com]

yay spirited away!! =)))) it is the sound they make!! hehe.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm.... to my native Russian ear those green things made the sound like "ooi, ooi", that had nothing to do with ы 8) Probably in English version they sounded different? I've seen both Russian version and original Japanese.