This week we are back to Russian Diction, with Siberian-born tenor Andrej Dunaev, discussing the texts to two Rachmaninoff songs, Opus 14 No 1 "Я жду тебя" (I Wait for You) and No 14 "Весенние воды" (Spring Waters). We concentrate on the й (I-kratkoe), the devoicing of consonants, the hard sign ъ (not to be confused with the soft sign ь or the vowel ы!), another way to write the JE vowel - ѣ and a little on the soft consonant щ.
Since I'm a big fan of trying to read the Cyrillic, here are the links to the texts for "Я жду тебя" and "Весенние воды" in Cyrillic. If you prefer, there are links directly under the texts to get the Roman alphabet transliterations.
The two podcasts mentioned on this episode are A Taste of Russian and The Russian Sound System, both of which are available free on iTunes. I also found a nice website called Russian Language Lessons, which is free and many of the lessons have audio clips to help you learn to pronounce, it seems comparable to the Talk Now! CD-rom series of language lessons with more grammar rules.
Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments here, at the Facebook page or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger.com