Let’s talk differences in learning Chinese through English and through Russian. When I talk about one sound in particular that I find definitely grabbed a piece of hair anywho, one particular sound I wanted to talk about today in the different ways that it would be introduced in Russian versus English. So the Chinese are something kind of like roughly my Chinese pronunciation isn’t the world’s greatest, but I have the experience of studying it. So in English, you would compare that most closely to rock, right? Like we just call it an r, which I think at the end of syllables that actually works like r, for example, the No. 2 I. It’s pretty close to the English idea of an art, probably a tiny bit different, but relatively close. However, at the beginning of the character, it’s more the kind of sound, John, for example. And what’s interesting is I heard that in Russian, they teach it this way. And I haven’t personally study Chinese using Russian, but I’ve heard this from someone else. But they actually tend to teach that sounds through the letter or share the letter and then shows the sound that it makes. Anything else here?
I was actually surprised to discover that the IPA symbols exactly the same because to me, I feel like they don’t sound completely identical. They’re very similar, but I do feel like there’s a very slight difference. So I’m like a little confused, but who am I to argue with the International Phonetic Alphabet because that are if you can hear it, I it’s a little bit in between right? Cuz in Russian we use the roll Dar to a Russian speaker, that sound actually sounds a little bit closer to Russia than it does to an R in the Russian language. But in English, r is the closest thing we’ve got. And yeah, we pronounce just some times like a genre, for example. But you know, that’s generally foreign pronunciation. It’s not actually like a letter in our alphabet, right? That’s just really fascinating how, oh, the same exact sound can be taught through such different pathways, like with a different baseline. And so I feel like that affects pronunciation as well, because Russian speakers are more likely to pronounce it closer to ship, and then English speakers are gonna pronounce it as right closer to R. Fascinating stuff.