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