Gluing Sounds
Russian is a phonetic language. The way you pronounce words is how you write them. The way they are written tells you how to pronounce them. Each letter has its own sound and generally keeps it. Unlike Dutch and English, Russian is quite consistent in this regard.
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From Letters to Words
The first step in Russian – learning the alphabet – is already a big step forward. Once you know the letters and their sounds, you can immediately read and pronounce a lot. You just glue the sounds together and try not to stumble.
Exceptions
Russian is a language with many rules, and for every rule, there’s an exception. An unstressed о sounds like an а. This is useful to know since о is the most common letter in Russian ( Wikipedia). Moreover, г (a “g” as in good) sometimes sounds like a “v” (as in сегодня – today), but at the end of a word, it can sound like a “k.” And there’s more like that.
Not hard at all, says Fedor. “Russian is one thing. English is way worse. Okay? Way worse!” (from 0:20).
Stress
Where the stress falls affects the pronunciation of vowels, and it can also change the meaning of a word. So, the placement of stress is важно (vazjna) – important, and in learning materials, it is often indicated with an accent mark (вáжно).
More
- Why O Sounds Like A in Russian (Real Russian Club, 2018, 6 m)
- Russian Word Stress (Denis Fedorov, 2017, 15 m)
- Vowel Reduction (Russian grammar, 2016, 6 m)
- Say It Right! A and O (Be Fluent in Russian, 2016, 5 m)
- Pronunciation Rules of the Russian Vowels А, О, У, Э, Ы (Christina Bjorn, 2014, 8 m)
- Russian Sounds (Denis Fedorov, 2016, 7 m)
last edited 04-03-2021
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Language
Verbs work for those who want to make sentences. There - work and make, there you already have two. And try to make Russian out of that sentence if you if you don’t know работать or делать. So work, also on your vocabulary.
Even with bad news there is good news: there is a lot to learn from it. Russian news articles are excellent teaching material, even for the more advanced student.
The sixth noun, in Russian предложный падеж, is for most students the first one they learn. The reason is simple: the sixth grammatical case itself is.
And then it became war. Or should we say began the special military operation. On
February 24 2022 Russian troops entered Ukraine. It was allowed
neither war nor invasion be called, but it was akin to both.
This often comes as a setback for students of Russian: of (almost) every Russian verb there are two. Which do mean approximately the same thing, but express very different things. So you need to know both, and of both learn the conjugations.
Making mistakes in Cyrillic is no big deal. Everyone does. But wrong Cyrillic, that’s the biggest mistake you can make. And the worst thing you can do with that noble Cyrillic can do.
