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Re: OT: US university course numbering (was Re: "to be" and not to be in the world's languages)

From:Amanda Babcock Furrow <ababcock@...>
Date:Friday, March 31, 2006, 17:36
On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 03:46:07AM -0800, David J. Peterson wrote:

> Having read Philip's explanation, however, > I...well, still find it baffling. An entire course devoted to > pronunciation? I find that a bit odd. Was it just pronunciation, > or did you (=Amanda) work on things like conversation, too?
Nope, it was entirely on pronunciation. One semester, 3 hours a week. There were other courses for conversation and grammar that a Russian major would take at the same time (I was a dual-major Russian and Physics, so I only ever took two Russian courses at once, but I got to skip the first year's courses due to three years of high school Russian). I still have the tapes of me carefully pronouncing after the prompts. It was a tape lab course - read the theory, practice, come in, do the tapes, hand the tapes in to the teacher for grading. The texts were "Zvuki, Udarenie, Intonatsiya" by Yu. G. Lebedeva and "Zvuki i Intonatsiya Russkoj Rechi" by E. A. Bryzgunova (a name which was a pronunciation challenge in its own right :), and they seem to cover pitch contours as well, so maybe that was part of the same class and not part of a different class as I remembered - there are seven pitch contours covered in the book - #1 is a neutral statement, #2 is wh-word (k-word? :) questions, #3 is used for both wh- and y/n questions, #4 for what appears to be "and how about...?" questions, #5 and #6 for exclaiming about something good in different ways, and #7 is a definite comment suitable for scolding someone with :) To return to pronunciation, some example teacher comments on the tape work included (using /y/ for /1/ - she wasn't using IPA, but Cyrillic, so it seems more natural to me to transcribe it the same way I would transcribe Cyrillic text) 1. plyvet, izdaleka, tol'ko - /l/ was either too soft or too hard plyvet /i/ instead of /y/ + soften up of /l/ 2. xrabryx, sorashny - almost /i/ instead of /y/ 3. u nix /n/ not soft enough, /x/ soft 4. ushki makushke koshki /sh/ softened So, yes, there was a semester's worth of work in there. The goal was to sound perfectly (if Muscovitely) native. Amanda