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Russian language help please


Alpo

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Posted

With Joe's Russian music thread, I was looking at a couple of the performers' names, and wrote down a couple to see if I can figure them out before actually looking them up.


The guitar player at the end of Katyusha. I decided that his name was Alexander. Then I did a letter for letter translation and came up with Aleksandr.  His last name though - Mesbko. Between the S and the K - what looks like a lowercase b - is a "soft sound". If the upright of the b had a little tail on it pointing backwards, it would be a "hard sound". But the site I found that was interpreting the letters did not explain (at least so I could understand) what a hard sound and a soft sound were. I'm not sure whether the s or the k is supposed to be soft, and how you would make them soft. Would a soft s sound like a z?

 

A little help?

 

Posted

So this is going to be like Spanish, where when I say the word "but" (pero) or the word "dog" (perro), no one will know which one I mean because I am unable to roll my Rs to pronounce that double R in perro.

Posted

Yeah, really. It's like Japanese people having trouble with the L sound. There is no L sound in Japanese, so they did not grow up learning to make that, and as adults their tongue does not want to make that noise. Or Germans with W.

 

Or Yankees with y'all.

Posted
32 minutes ago, Alpo said:

Yeah, really. It's like Japanese people having trouble with the L sound. There is no L sound in Japanese, so they did not grow up learning to make that, and as adults their tongue does not want to make that noise. Or Germans with W.

 

Or Yankees with y'all.

 

We Yankees have absolutely no difficulty saying "yawl", except we are referring to our yachts, not a bastardized contraction of "you all".

 

;)

 

LL

Posted

The bastardized contraction of you all is "you'ns", which I believe is pronounced like "nuns" except with a Y.

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