(no subject)

[because-i-dream.livejournal.com]

Hiya,
My names Candace, and next year when i go off to college, i'm going to take Russian. I know nothing of the language. :/

I understand that it is not a Romantic language, and that itself will make it more difficult to learn than say, French or Spanish.. but how hard ISSS it?

Just saying hi. :) I look forward to speaking (and thinking) fluently soemday.

Comments

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

It's not such a good term because it sounds like you're imply that the sound is, in fact, two sounds blended together.

You can make this case for affricates ("ch") because they're basically a stop (like "t") followed by a fricative (like "sh"). To a lesser extent, you can make this case for the soft vowels, because occasionally they do represent two sounds -- the consonant "y" followed by the vowel. (But not always, and they're not "blended", really.)

But sounds like and "zh", "sh", "x" are single sounds. For example, the sound "sh" is not "s+h". It's an unvoiced alveolar fricative. The reason why English represents it as "sh" is that the basic Latin alphabet doesn't have a single letter for the sound, so a digraph was used instead (some languages use diacritics, for example using a hacek over the s). A digraph is a pair of letters that represent a single sound.

[scuttle.livejournal.com]

thanks. I obviously don't understand the tecnical terms.

[noktulo.livejournal.com]

X = k+s

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I typed that comment, but I think that I was referring to the Russian x. :)