Russian For Dummies. Serafima Gettys

informal singular), вы (vi) (you; formal singular or plural), and мы (mi) (we) — it’s important to say it as best you can.

      The soft sign

      The soft sign is the letter ь. We transcribe it by using the symbol ’, and it doesn’t have a sound. Its only mission in life is to make the preceding consonant soft. This sound is very important in Russian because it can change the meaning of a word. Without the soft sign, the word мaть (maht’) (mother) becomes мaт, which means obscene language. And when you add a soft sign at the end of the word вoн (vohn) (over there), it becomes вoнь (vohn’) and means stench. See how important the soft sign is?

       Here’s how you can make consonants soft:

      1 Say the consonant (such as Лл, Tт, or Дд), and note where your tongue is.You should feel the tip of your tongue touching the ridge of your upper teeth. The rest of the tongue should be hanging in your mouth like a hammock in a garden on a nice summer day.

      2 While you’re still pronouncing the consonant, raise the body of your tongue, and press it against the hard palate.The process is exactly the same as preparing a piece of bubble gum for blowing a bubble by flattening the gum on the roof of your mouth. Bingo: You’re ready to pronounce your soft consonant. Can you hear how the quality of the consonant changes? It sounds much “softer” now, doesn’t it?

      The hard sign

      The hard sign is represented by the letter ъ. Whereas the soft sign makes the preceding consonant sound soft (see the preceding section), the hard sign makes it — yes, you guessed it — hard. The good news is that this letter (which is transcribed as a double quotation mark [”]) is rarely used in contemporary Russian, and even when it is, it doesn’t really change the pronunciation of the word. So why does Russian have this sign? For two purposes:

       To harden the preceding consonant

       To retain the hardness of the consonant before the vowels Ee, Ёё, Юю, and Яя

      Without the hard sign, these consonants normally would soften. When a hard sign (ъ) separates a consonant and one of these vowels, the consonant is pronounced without softening, as in the word пoдъeзд (pahd-yehzd) (porch).

       Don’t worry too much about this one if your native language is English. Native speakers of English rarely tend to soften their Russian consonants the way Russians do it. In other words, if you’re a native English speaker, and you come across the situation described here, you’ll probably make your consonant hard, pronouncing it correctly by default!

      FUN & GAMES

      Match the Russian letters in the first column with the sounds they correspond to in the second column. You can find the answers in Appendix C.

1 H	a. r
2 P	b. n
3 Г	c. ee
4 Я	d. ya
5 И	e. g