Szczepanska Kathryn. Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide

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Russian

A Self-Teaching Guide

Kathryn Szczepanska

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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

10987654321

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

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.

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].

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

Brackets will be used throughout the text to indicate pronunciation.

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

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 RUSSIAN: A Self-Teaching Guide

They are also called palatalized and nonpalatalized.

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

The Russian Alphabet 3