Pronunciation of "Zdravstvyuitye"

[John Langran]

Thankyou to colleagues who responded on this.

I couldn't help a smile when the thread led to cabinet making, as I had 
taken a few days off to make a cupboard. To put the record straight about 
"samshit", boxwood, there are about 70 varieties of this tree / bush. The 
wood has a vary dense quality, widely used for carving, eg chess pieces, and 
for inlays in decorative carpentry.

I was surprised by the intensity of some of the responses to my query. It 
seems that "a**" is much more rude in American English than in British 
English. Here it just means "donkey". We have sold 15,000 copies of Ruslan 1 
in the UK with this mnemonic, without a single critical comment, to my 
knowledge.

"Does your a** fit you?" really does help with the teaching of the 
pronounciation of this difficult but essential word. Once students have 
memorised the basic sounds the teacher can fine tune the pronunciation 
without the learners forgetting the basic parts of the word each time they 
look away from the board.

I have to confess to a bias in this area. I never liked formal phonetics and 
have to date managed passably well without them. They seem to me to be too 
difficult for many students, and overall counter-productive. The majority of 
learners want to concentrate on meaning and on being able to communicate, 
not on perfect pronounciation.

To just teach "Privyet" isn't an answer. Your learners might want to greet 
someone important, or perhaps a police officer in a bad mood ...

Thankyou to Emily Saunders for a wonderful list of Russian > English 
renderings. Very memorable.

Thanks to John Dunn for putting things in a practical context. I checked 
with the person who first told me this trick (a former student of mine). It 
was indeed from his uncle, now in mid 70s, who had learned Russian for work 
on the Arctic convoys!

Now I have to decide whether to include this mnemonic in the US edition of 
my Ruslan course. Maybe not, if it will lead some teachers into discipline 
problems.

Linked to this, I have queries about games in the classroom and about the 
use of simple songs for learning. I'll ask them separately, later.

John Langran
www.ruslan.co.uk








.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------