LingoflyЬ ь — soft sign
«soft sign» is a sign of the Kazakh script. No sound of its own. The Kazakh alphabet has 42 letters in total. Only in borrowed words. It appears, for example, in the word “Апельсин” (Apelsin) — orange.
In short
| Character | Ь ь |
| Name | soft sign |
| Sound | a softening mark |
| What it is | a sign |
In our course the character comes 39th of 42, its neighbours in the course are і and э, appears in 33 words of this site.
How to type Ь ь
- On a phone: add the Kazakh keyboard in the keyboard settings (Gboard on Android; Keyboards in the iPhone settings).
- In Word on Windows: type U+044C and press Alt+X right after it — the code turns into the character.
- On a Mac: switch to the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 044C.
- Unicode code points: ь — U+044C, Ь — U+042C. With them, the characters can be found in the character map of any system.
How it sounds
No sound of its own
The character in the “only in loanwords” group
Six signs that came in with Russian words: ё ц щ ъ ь э. Native Kazakh words do without them, apart from a handful with щ, and the new Latin alphabet has no letters for them. в, ф and ч also live almost only in loanwords, but they stand with the common letters.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound, see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 42 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Kazakh character ь read?
A softening mark. It is a sign of the Kazakh script. No sound of its own.
What is the letter ь called?
Soft sign is what this character is called when the alphabet is recited aloud.