Russian - 'Joining' of words

I have not come across this in English, Afrikaans or German, yet in Russian it seems quite normal to ‘join’ two words when talking. There are quite a few examples in the Beginners dialogues, the following two taken from Eating Out - 2:
ресторан открывается (sounds like ресторанот крывается when read)
каторый сейчас (sounds like каторыйсей час when read)
Is this normal in Russian?

In English you don’t pronounce “th” like in “don’t let 'em”. It sounds like “don’t lettem”. Actualy, there are many examples of it.
When you’re getting used to the rythm of the language the words will click into place.

So yeah, this is normal in Russia to join words, to pet bears and to put leaders of the nation into the glass showroom right in the middle of the Capital City after they’re dead :smiley:

@S.I. is quite correct: English speakers join words all the time, I’d say that even more so than Russian ones. You may not have noticed it because it’s your mother tongue. Funny examples include people asking what are “deggs” because they’ve been offered a choice between fry deggs and scramble deggs for breakfast (heard that on an English teaching podcast about connected speech) or my own diffficulty understanding Michael Jackson’s line "Annie, are yuwukay?

German is a bit special because it tends to add a little glottal stop between words beginning by a vowel, so it sounds less joined; but it’s much more an exception than a rule among European languages.
I don’t know much about Afrikaans but French, Portuguese, Spanish, … do connect words in the speech.

This is Rachel’s English playlist about linking in English:

I’ve been speaking English since age 5, personally I say “fried eggs”, “scrambled eggs” and “don’t let them” (although German is my mother tongue, I can express myself far better in English, as I use it daily). Regional accents, as in “how ya doi’g?”, and sloppy speech are not quite what I noticed in my Russian examples, where every letter is clearly articulated, they just make letters in the second word sound like they’re part of the first, this makes it difficult for beginners to follow as they may, for example, look for крывается and каторыйсей in the dictionary. :slight_smile:

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It’s not sloppy speech, but connected speech. Notice that the “fry degg” example comes from a series about standard, formal British accent, and watch Rachel’s videos, where she insists that you must link words to speak like native American native speakers.
Maybe you are using some German phonotactics when you speak English, even if your English is currently better than your German.
This is a link to the BBC program series about connected speech. Notice that they don’t ever refer to “informal” or “sleepy” speech but to normal, standard one, even when they refer to examples such as “fry deggs” or “hambag” for “hand bag”, or “swi-choff” for “switch off”
This is the general introduction to the series, there are links to each of the podcasts. which discuss different aspects of connected speech, including consontant to vowel or vowel to vowel connections:

Ah, but I’m not living in the US where almost every state has its own ‘twang’, even ‘our’ Charlize Theron, now living in the US, has adopted the US accent. Another US favourite is “mistle” for missile. :wink: We speak South African English, which also comes with a range of location-dependent accents. During a recent visit to Malawi our host asked if I want a “humbug”, when he actually meant hamburger.

In German we also ‘swallow’ letters to make it sound more natural when spoken, something I often remind my wife about when she speaks textbook German, a prime example is the word “Schinken” (ham), which is actually pronounced “Schink’n”, as in, one buys an old dilapidated house (known colloquially as a “Schinken”) and by fixing it up, turns it into a “Räucherschinken” (smoked ham). :slight_smile:

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It doesn’t matter in Russian how you say - joining words or every word separately. If we speak quickly, we join words automatically in any language.
It’s more important in Russian that unstressed ‘o’ we say as ‘a’, unstressed ‘e’ like ‘и’, -ого in the endings we say ‘ава’.

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Yeah this is one of the things with the Kate Clapp. Not only does she speak gibberish, but it’s joined together gibberish.

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