IPA Background but still don't understand how to velarise / palatise consonants?

[unpredictabloke]

I don't understand velarisation and palatisation of consonants at all.
I understand where the velum and palates are, but have trouble matching it with native speakers. I guess this is a common problem for people learning Russian, huh? In Irish, they have broad(velarised)/slender(palatised) distinctions, too.

How can I draw some comparisons to my native language, English? Since /b/ is just /b/ in English and not /b^j/, I have no real references in my brain. Are there some instances in English that have palatised/velarisation of consonants going on?

At the current moment, when I want to "palatise" a consonant, I first put my tongue in the /j/ position as if I'm about to say yes, and then go on to pronounce the actual sound I'm interested in. Same for velarised consonants. I put my tongue in the /k/ position, and then pronounce the actual letter I want. But it seems crude. Is this how to go about it, or is there another way of intuiting palatisation and velarisation? How do you tackle "soft" and "hard" consonants in your target language?

[Serpent]

Can you hear the difference? How long have you been learning Russian? I think most learners use some kind of crude strategy in the beginning, and eventually get used to it
Also afaiu etymologically it's more likely to develop out of i than out of j.

[tarvos]

Any consonant that has your tongue stuck to the top of your palate has got palatalisation going on. When you pronounce "sh", that's a palatalised consonant already. English does it too - some accents pronounce news, tube, produce, dew, etc with a y sound after the consonant. I, for example, would pronounce New York Nyu York, and not Nu York. However, this pronunciation is not reflected in spelling because in English it's not universal.

The soft variants of the Russian sounds are pronounced with your tongue stuck a bit towards the top of your throat (but not entirely - otherwise your s sound would turn into some sort of sh, and that's not what you want). Putting your tongue up as if you were going to pronounce a y sound and then pronouncing your consonant is the basic idea. Basically you want to do exactly that, but vary the degree as to how far forward you end up placing your tongue, and you want to do it with the tip, you don't want to smash your tongue against your palate, because that's what causes the consonants to turn into sh's and ch's and so on. In some cases, like with the soft t, it almost sounds as if you're pronouncing a ts, at least in Russian. ть/ць are pretty close.

Basically what happens is that when you have the vowels я/ю/е(ё)/и in Russian, you have to pronounce a soft consonant. However, е/и are the most common culprits because what palatalisation actually does is pull sounds further forward in your mouth. As the pure vowel sounds e and i are pronounced at the front of your mouth, it's much easier for the mouth to pull the consonants forward. In Russian this has led to the fact that the sounds really become produced up front in the mouth. You can see it in English as well because c, g are sounds that are pronounced differently when followed by e or i and it's because those are front vowel sounds, and this has pulled the sounds up front in the mouth from k and g to s and a dzh sound. However, the real trouble is that Russian distinguishes gradations of these consonants (с, сь, ш, щ) whereas English only has с/ш. That latter representation is a bit rough because the Russian ш is retroflex, but this doesn't matter, this is the starting point.

Velarization is the opposite process - it's pulling sounds further back in your mouth. Russian doesn't have velarized consonants apart from the dark l sound, though. All other consonants are pure.