Russian language - help please

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I have just started learning Russian from the internet, and I have a question.

What do the letters "ь" and "ъ" mean? The website I'm using says that they indicate a hard or soft letter, but I don't really understand what this means. For example, the word "шесть" (six) is pronounced "shest", but how would this be different without the ь?

uh...as far as I know, a 'hard' sound would be a 'dental' (using the teeth to cut short a sound; like a consonant), soft would be a slower dental. But I'm on shaky ground there...

Ya Nye Znayu...

I think that "ь" is the quick sort of thing (as in English "short"), and "ъ" doesn't actually make any difference. Maybe.

ь Is indeed a short stop and ъ a hard one. Here's an example: объект - object. It will add a kind of J sound to the vowel after it, so putting ъ in ь's place will not work.

I have a friend from Belarus who speaks Russian, and he taught me some concepts. The letters "ь" and "ъ" don't have a sound of their own, but simply modify the sound of the consonant before it, and can be followed by any letter. The "ь" (soft sign) makes the preceding letter have a softer sound than its standard pronunciation. The "ъ" (hard sign) does the opposite: it lets the preceding letter keep its hard sound, when its standard pronunciation would be soft. I can't really explain these concepts, because the English phonetics has no equivalents. Aspie or not, even I have trouble really grasping this, and people say I'm good with languages.

Here's a less technical explanation. In Russian words, certain vowels soften the sound of the preceding consonant, while consonants and other vowels maintain its original sound; there are clear rules for this, with the exception of some foreign words. The letters "ь" and "ъ" make the pronunciation deviate from those rules, and causing words to be pronounced differently than if these letters weren't there.

What aspie1 has said is correct. I'm trying to learn Russian as well. In Irkutsk as we speak

Спасибо, everyone

Another question: When Russian is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, I've seen the "ь" transliterated as a ' (apostrophe). How would a "ъ" be transliterated?

And how can you tell which syllable is stressed in words with more than one syllable?

@ EC - when you say "J sound", do you mean how a J would be pronounced in English (like a soft G), or the Russian pronunciation (like a Y)?

J is pronounced like DZh, I'll give you the cyrillics tomorrow for illustration. I know this cause my name being Jason, it's weird seeing it and hearing it in Russian.

Edit - its ДЖ

Multisyllables generally will have the hard and soft in there.

Last edited by Jaythefordman on 18 Oct 2009, 8:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It varies, since there is no standard convention. My friend, who I mentioned earlier, uses the apostrophe for both the "ь" and the "ъ", and that seems to be the most common way. Other methods include using the " (quote) for the "ъ", replacing it with a Y, or omitting it altogether.

You generally can't; you simple remember, although most textbooks and some children's books show stressed syllables with an accent mark.

They don’t. They are silent in the words. They are called soft sign and hard sign respectively and just make consonants before them in a word sound phonetically soft or hard accordingly.

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Last edited by B19 on 16 Nov 2019, 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.: spam

My interest in Denis Istomin sparked an interest in learning Russian. This is an interesting post.