Re: Russian soft/hard 'l' minimal pairs (was: glottals)

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 12:00:10AM -0800, Philippe Caquant wrote:

> The idea is that, if I happen to travel through Russia
> for instance, and want to buy a newspaper from a
> native mastering only his native language, which is
> Russian, I don't have to study Russian for 12 years,
> which seems to me to be the minimum to master it more
> or less.
I hope you're exaggerating.  I only studied it for 6 or 7 years,
half of which were in highschool and only covered one year's
worth of college work together.  I got perfect marks on pronunciation
and certainly had no trouble distinguishing soft and hard l!

(There was a third-year-level course on nothing but pronunciation
in college, which consisted pretty much entirely of headphones-and-
microphone work in the audio lab.  I enjoyed it very much, but what
I learned in there was stuff like the exact vowel contours, not the
hard l/soft l distinction that was obvious from back in high school.)

Amanda