Home  FAQs How does the Choir learn to pronounce the words?
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How does the Choir learn to pronounce the words? |
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Professor Grottel uses a technique called transliteration to great effect. He has used this in Middlebury, and brought it to his Russian classes at St. Cloud State. Transliteration is pretty simple--it just changes the Russian cyrillic letters to the more familiar latin alphabet we're accustomed to. From there, he runs through the words with us many times without music to work on our pronounciation, inflection, and intonation. This has allowed the choir to, on the whole, sing russian without much accent. In fact, Doc is so successful at teaching us to speak based off of his accent that when we sing Shedrik (carol of the bells) in Ukrainian, we are often told we sing it with a russian accent, instead of Ukrainian!
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