What sounds can not be pronounced by Russian?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

What is good for a Russian is death for a German. However, in linguistics, everything is not so simple, and this law also works in the opposite direction. In almost every language for Russians, there are sounds that cannot be reproduced on the fly. Some of them take months to master.

Traditionally, Chinese is considered to be the most difficult language. In practice, mastering the pronunciation in it is not difficult for people with good hearing. Of the sounds that our speech apparatus is not used to making, the most difficult in this language is the sound "r" - something between "w" and "r". Chinese is complicated, first of all, by its tones, which are from 4 to 9 (in Cantonese). There are even more tones in the Vietnamese language - about 18.

If we talk about European languages, in particular, about German, then the most difficult for a Russian person are ä, ö, ü. But it is not difficult to learn how to pronounce them, because in our speech there are words, when pronouncing which we involuntarily emit similar sounds, for example, in the words "muesli" or "honey".

Beavers walked along the log

It's a little harder to learn French with its nasal consonants and the "r" sound. What is the norm for France (elegant grazing), Russian speech therapists are trying to correct. In our country, people who were unable to pronounce the firm "r" were called burrites, and a tongue twister about a Greek thrusting his hand into a river and about beavers on a log is one of the exercises designed to help in setting this sound.

In some dialects of German, this grazing also sounds, but more rolling - such as was the case with the famous "French sparrow" Edith Piaf. The English do not pronounce the letter "r" at all, but is only indicated by a sound more similar, as in Chinese, to "zh".

East is a delicate matter

Eastern culture is very different from Slavic, and the Semitic language family also differs sharply. For example, it contains sounds that have no exact counterparts in Russian. These include, in particular, laryngeal, pronounced not by the mouth, but by the throat. There are four of them in Hebrew, as in Arabic. On the territory of modern Israel, they have practically been reduced, but among those Jews who were born in Arab countries, they are found. The same can be said about some Caucasian languages with their guttural sounds, for example, Adyghe, Chechen, etc.

You can imagine these sounds if you remember the trip to the lore. The very "a" that he makes us say, pressing the root of the tongue with a spatula, is precisely the laryngeal. The harshness of the Arabic speech, which seems to many Slavs not very melodic, is due to the presence of such throat sounds.

Interdental sounds, in which the tip of the tongue is located between the upper and lower teeth, is also a wonder for Russian people, but in some European languages they are, for example, in English. Arabic back-linguals, which are also found in the languages of the northern peoples, are also very difficult to pronounce. The famous Baikal is the Yakut Baigal, modified by the Russians for the convenience of pronunciation, where the "g" is just the back-lingual.

From the trampling of hooves, dust flies across the field

Onomatopoeia by the clatter of horse hooves and the clicking of the tongue is just entertainment for the Russian people. But there are peoples for whom such sounds are the norm for speech. Those who watched the film “The Gods Probably Have Gone Madness” remember how one of the main characters and all of his native tribesmen spoke a language that sounds very strange to us.

Koisan languages. They are spoken by only about 370,000 people in southern Africa and Tanzania. They are distributed mainly among the inhabitants of the area surrounding the Kalahari Desert. These languages are gradually dying out. Clinking consonants are called "cliques", and their number sometimes reaches 83. In addition to the Khoisan languages, clixes are also found in Bantu and Dahalo as the main components of speech.

With a desire and patience, a Russian person can master any language, including Khoisan. It's just a matter of time.