Do пиво and pivă sound the same to you?
Not quite, I would say that piv
a,is rather a combination of a and ă,but it also depends on how fast you speak. I don t think Russians pay too much attention on it,that why some speak with more schwas than others.
Posttonic "a" and "o" always turn into "ə", and both also turn into "ə", if the stressed syllable is...gah, forgot the word, take карандáш, for example, the "a"s all have different vowal qualities: ə - ʌ - a.
...at least in Standard Russian.
Yes, I also noticed that as far the o/a in Russian are from the stress,as more likely to be pronounced as schwa they are.
And he must've got an ear to distinguish it, since in Romanian it's phonemic (which gives me a lot of troubles
I mean c'mon, ziua and ziuă, how are they different?
)
Standard Romanian speakers are usually very disturbed if your schwa doesn't sound good. Because of the fact that we ,Moldovans, used the Russian alphabet until 1991, and the schwa was transilterated as э , we got used to pronounce it like a clear ae . This is why when I came here many people were totally disturbed by my way of pronouncing it. Afterwards I tried to cultivate the true schwa.
And yes, ziua and ziuă are very different for a Romanian ear. One would be z
iuʌ and the other z
iuə . Despite of sounding different, you can often be missunderstood ,because in this case, the schwa marks the non-definite article, and ,simple -a marks the definite article for a feminine nown.