Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self-Teaching Guides)

313 Pages·2005·2.27 MB·English

by  Kathryn Szczepanska

Russian
A Self-Teaching Guide
Kathryn Szczepanska
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2005 by Kathryn Szczepanska. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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ISBN-13 978-0-471-26989-2 (paper)
ISBN-10 0-471-26989-1 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of
Bruce Everett Fritch
(1936–1985)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 The Russian Alphabet 1
2 The Noun 14
3 The Accusative Case 38
4 The Adjective 57
5 The Verb 88
6 The Prepositional Case 98
7 Present Tense Verbs 115
8 The Dative Case 138
9 Aspect of Verbs 156
10 Future Tense and Imperative Mode 167
11 The Dative Case (continued) 178
12 The Genitive Case 188
13 The Genitive Plural 214
14 The Instrumental Case 236
15 Verbs of Motion 251
16 The Prepositional, Dative, and Instrumental Plural 271
17 Participles 280
Russian-English Vocabulary 299
v
Acknowledgments
I hereby acknowledge publicly to my former professors at Stanford University—
Joseph A. Van Campen and Dina B. Crockett—that they were right about every-
thing. I am grateful to the editors at John Wiley & Sons for their unstinting
generosity of time and labor, especially to John Simko for his attention to detail,
Jeff Golick for his patience, and copy editor Dobrochna Dyrcz-Freeman for her
sharp eye and mind.To Stan and Nancy, the sine qua non of my existence, a big fat
punch in the nose. And to my Muse and herself a future author, Pamela Rose
Machado, thanks for keeping me up at all hours of the day and night, and for sim-
ply being you.
vi
1
The Russian Alphabet
Русский алфавит
The Russian alphabet, also called Cyrillic, consists of thirty-three letters repre-
senting thirty-one sounds and two signs that have no phonetic value of their own.
It is attributed to the Greek monks Cyrill and Methodius, who came as mission-
aries to Christianize the Slavic countries and left their mark on the language as
well. Modified forms of this alphabet are still in use today in countries other than
Russia, including Bulgaria and some of the new nations of the former Yugoslavia.
Approximately one-third of the Cyrillic alphabet consists of letters that are
identical to the Roman alphabet, with a phonetic value that is either almost equal
or similar. Another third of the letters are recognizable to Westerners because of
their Greek origin: п is the Greek pi, р is the Greek rho, and so forth. The final
third consists of letters that were created to represent sounds in the Slavic lan-
guages that had no counterpart in the original Greek of the missionary monks.
Some of these letters have a Hebrew origin, such as the letter ш [sh].1
Although there are visual and phonetic similarities, almost no Russian letter
is pronounced in quite the same way as its English counterpart. Russian vowels
are purer and more clear than English vowels, and, except for combinations with
the consonant-glide й, do not form diphthongs. Many Russian consonants form
“hard” and “soft” pairs, which are not easy to represent in English. Consonants
that are plosive in English (p, b, t, d) are not plosive in Russian, which makes their
1Brackets will be used throughout the text to indicate pronunciation.
1
2 RUSSIAN: A Self-Teaching Guide
pronunciation for English speakers difficult. And last, the famous Russian frica-
tives ш [sh], ж [zh], ч [ch], щ [sh’], ц [ts] pose challenges all their own.
You will find a complete list of the Russian alphabet on page 13.
Sounds and Spelling
Vowels
There are ten Russian letters for five vowel sounds:
Hard Soft
Letter Pronunciation Letter Pronunciation
а a as in father я ya as in yard
э e as in fed е ye as in yet
ы i as in sit и ee as in feet
о o as in home ё yo as in yore
у oo as in food ю yu as in Yukon
The vowels in the first column are called hard and are written at the beginning of
a word and after hard consonants. The vowels in the second column are the soft
vowels. They are written after soft consonants and when the word begins with
an iotated vowel (the sound [y]). Compare the following: áлто (alto)—Ûлта
(Yalta); Эмñлия (Emilia)—Елéна (Yelena); Óльга (Olga)—ёжик (hedgehog);
Урáл (Urals)—Îрий (Yuri). The letters representing the sound [i] do not quite
fit this paradigm, since their pure sounds are not quite the same. Nonetheless,
they obey the rule above: the ы is written after hard consonants and the и after
soft consonants.
Consonants
Hard or Soft
2
Russian consonants may be either hard or soft. Most English consonants are pro-
nounced with a hard articulation, but most Russian consonants can be pro-
nounced either way. By far the best example for English speakers of the
difference between a hard and a soft consonant is the Spanish consonant ñ and
the English letter n. The sound also occurs occasionally in English words, such as
2
They are also called palatalized and nonpalatalized.
The Russian Alphabet 3
onion and poignant. As a device to assist in the pronunciation of Russian soft con-
sonants, some textbooks suggest the insertion of the glide [y] between the conso-
nant and the following vowel so that a hard n plus a would be transcribed as [na]
and a soft n plus a as [nya]. This device is not quite correct, but it can be useful to
help the student achieve a correct pronunciation.
The following list of consonants shows the hard and soft pairs possible in
modern Russian. For ease in pronunciation, they are shown with the vowel letters
э and е.
Hard Soft Hard Soft
бэ бе нэ не
вэ ве пэ пе
гэ ге рэ ре
дэ де сэ се
зэ зе тэ те
кэ ке фэ фе
лэ ле хэ хе
мэ ме
There are six consonants in Russian that are either hard or soft, but not both.
The three always-hard consonants are ж [zh], ц [ts], and ш [sh]. No matter which
vowel follows them, they will always be pronounced hard. The three consonants
that are always pronounced soft are ч [ch], щ [sh’], and й ([y] as in boy). These
facts have various consequences for the writing system. None of these consonants
may be followed by the vowel ы (the vowel и is written instead). In addition, the
vowels я and ю appear as а and у. The result is the all-important seven-letter
spelling rule:
After the fricatives ж, ч, ш, щ, and the velars к, г, х, do not write ы, я, or
ю; instead, write и, а, or у.
The letter ц is not part of this spelling rule. The full explanation for this spelling
rule can be appreciated only with an understanding of the historical morphology
of Russian.
The pronunciations of the consonants ж, ч, ш, and щ differ from their
transliterated values [zh], [ch], [sh], and [sh’]. In fact, their articulation in terms of
hardness and softness is opposite to their sounds in English. In Russian, the con-
sonants ж and ш are always hard, whereas they are soft in English. The reverse is
true for the consonants ч and щ. This will explain the English transliteration of
the name of the composer Чайкóвский as Tchaikovsky, which attempts to move