(no subject)

[upthera44.livejournal.com]

There is a Russian grammar rule that I have trouble remembering because it seems particularly illogical. Please discuss the difference when using numbers with masculine adjective-noun combinations and feminine adjective-noun combinations. For example...

У меня два хороших друга.

У меня две хорошие газеты.

(note that in the second example, despite the use of the number 2, the "good newspapers" remains in nominative case, whereas in the first it is put in genitive because of the number). Spasibo

Pronunciation of 'a'

[ginny1985.livejournal.com]

    I've been reading a book on Russian linguistics, and the author said something in it that surprised me a little- "...normal [a] is fronted to [ae] only when between two soft consonants..." and his example was p'at', five ([ae] is standing in for the 'a' sound like in the word 'ash' or 'cat', I don't have a phonetic alphabet on this computer).  I've always said p'at' with the standard [a] sound, and I can't recall ever hearing p'at' with the [ae].  And after three and a half years of formal instruction, I should like to think that one of my professors would have corrected me if I had been saying it wrong.  Were my professors just being lax with their silly American students, did I learn a nonstandard dialect, are they both considered correct pronunciations, or did the author mess something up?
    The book was written by Paul Cubberly and first published in 2002, if that helps at all.

UPD- Thanks to everyone who answered; your comments were all helpful.  I really appreciate everyone who took the time to answer.  : )

Russian for "connect" and "password"

[bumpycat.livejournal.com]

Dear Learn_russian

I need to send a query to a Russian colleague, but I'm not sure of the appropriate words for connect (in the sense of connecting from one computer to another) or password. The query is "If you still cannot connect, I will phone you with your new password." An online translator gave me the following -

Если Вы все еще не можете соединяться, я позвоню Вам с вашим новым паролем.

Is this correct?

Thanks in advance!

(no subject)

[bellezzarubata.livejournal.com]

Forgive me if I completely butcher the endings but I couldn't find "shower curtain" in my dictionary so I just pieced together the two separate words. Would it be "doosh-novo zano-veskyeh"?

Thank you! : /

Шить

[damiel.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to reconcile the following two "spelling rules"

1. A vowel following the letter ш is always pronounced hard, irrespective of spelling;
2. A ь inserted between a consonant and a soft vowel indicates that the consonant is palatalized and the glide (й) is retained in the pronunciation of the vowel;

to make sense of how the verbal forms of шить (шью, шьёшь, ..., шьют) should be pronounced. To take the first person as an example, does it end up being something like /шу/ or /шы.у/ or /шы.йу/ or /щи.у/ or /щи.йу/ or ...? Also, how many syllables?

Thanks!

большой полиглот

[marta-mb.livejournal.com]

О, я большой полиглот и знаю очень большое количество языков.

It's a citation from "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, Chapter 1. The words are said by Voland in responce to the question where he had learnt Russian. The utterance is grammatically correct but there are at least two inaccuracies in it, and it sounds rather bad.
The question: 1) what is wrong about this sentence, and 2) (more complicated) WHY is it uttered just this way? Thanks.

P.S. It's a most fascinating task from my past Russian C tutorial, and it seems interesting to offer it here.