E and ё in the lessons

I noticed that there are plenty of places in the lessons where you would expect to see “её”. Instead, you get “ee”. The record clearly has “ye-yo”.

Is this a weird convention I have to just accept, sloppy text editing, or something else going on?

Благодарю вас!

I have noticed the same problem in the russian mini stories.

It’s something that you need to accept. It’s very common to see ё with the missing diacritic anywhere, not just in её. I don’t know, but I’m tempted to say that it’s rare to see it in common usage. As for the specific case of её it’s no big deal to be able to recognize ее for what it is, since there’s no “ye-ye” word. (If there is, it’s so rare I don’t recall seeing it ever.) For other cases, I guess it comes with practice, from exposure to words either from listening or from seeing it when it is spelled with ё. Then, with enough such exposure, you can sometimes sense when the stress ought to fall on that syllable and that it should be pronouced as ё even when you see it spelled with е. Russian stress is not really predictable, but over time you do get a sense for what might make most sense, at least in some sorts of words.

BTW, the English Wikipedia has an interesting article about this letter. And about halfway down it says:

"Except for a brief period after World War II, the use of ⟨ё⟩ was never obligatory in standard Russian orthography. By and large, it is used only in dictionaries and in pedagogical literature intended for children and students of Russian as a second language. Otherwise, ⟨е⟩ is used, and ⟨ё⟩ occurs only when it is necessary to avoid ambiguity (such as to distinguish between все (“everybody”) and всё (“everything”) when it is not obvious from the context) or in words (principally proper nouns) whose pronunciation may not be familiar to the reader. Recent recommendations (2006) from the Russian Language Institute are to use ⟨ё⟩ in proper nouns to avoid an incorrect pronunciation. It is permitted, however, to mark ⟨ё⟩ whenever it occurs, which is the preference of some Russian authors and periodicals.

“The fact that ⟨ё⟩ is frequently replaced with ⟨е⟩ in print often causes some confusion to both Russians and non-Russians, as it makes it more difficult for Russian words and names to be transcribed. One recurring problem is with Russian surnames, as both -ев (-ev) and -ёв (-yov) are common endings. Thus, the English-speaking world knows two leaders of the former Soviet Union as Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but their surnames end in Russian with -ёв, better transcribed -yov (which is why many English-speakers pronounce these names as if they end in -ov but they spell them with -ev).”

Source: Yo (Cyrillic) - Wikipedia

As I note below, it’s kind of rare to see ё in everyday use. The mini stories are not really everyday use, though, being more the “pedagogical literature intended for … students of Russian as a second language”. It would be a help if someone could edit those to include the “correct” letter where it’s missing.

Thanks for all the information! As you said it would be useful to see ё in the mini stories. The mini stories are for beginners and therefore it would be especially helpful to have an “ё” in all the correct places.

Я редко вижу «ё» используется.

I suppose I cannot be too whiny about it, English has an insane number of exceptions/nonsensical pronunciations. And that doesn’t include the slang. Thank you all for the insight!