Table Of ContentPronounce Russian Properly
MASTER THE PRONUNCIATION AND THE MUSIC OF RUSSIAN
TATIANA KHARITONCHIK
Pronounce Russian Properly
Copyright © 2014 Tatiana Kharitonchik
Edited and partially translated by Fabien Snauwaert
Cover by Ulyana Kharitonchik
All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome
Welcome to our training, designed specifically for you – a person who wants to speak Russian
properly and be easily understood! Our main objective is to get you acquainted with the sounds and
the manners of speaking that exist in Russian but do NOT exist in English. It is quite possible to
learn how to pronounce Russian correctly: you simply need to master typically Russian sounds,
stress, rhythm and intonation. To sum up, the goal is that Russian sounds be no longer a secret to
you, as this the only way to master your verbal communication in Russian.
The moment the sounds and the music of Russian become evident to you, understanding and
speaking Russian will become more evident as well. This kind of training is rather fast in
comparison with studying Russian grammar or vocabulary. Where learning grammar or vocabulary
typically takes months, working on the phonetics of a language may be done in a matter of a few
short weeks. Your ears may need some time to get used to all those new sounds (about 15 days) but,
as soon as this happens, many activities will become more accessible. You may, for example,
become able to listen to various songs without having the lyrics in front of you, or to understand
more dialogues in a TV show. Besides, you will understand more clearly what other people are
saying and you will be more articulate and easier to understand in your own communication.
If you are still a beginner in Russian, congratulations. This book and its bonuses will help you
develop good listening and pronunciation habits from the start. Language teaching often neglects
good pronunciation and this then causes a majority of foreign speakers to speak with a thick or hard-
to-understand accent.
If you have been learning Russian for some time now but still struggle with spoken language, the
purpose of this training will be to help you get rid of your bad habits. We will help you understand
what you should have been told from day 1 in your language studies. Sounds and phonetics are
critical to good communication (a language is nothing but sound) and we will help you fix those
issues for you.
No matter where you are coming from, the knowledge gained from this book will help you
enormously if you decide to study another new language because you will have quite a solid base in
phonetics without the impression of studying hard.
The first concept we want you to be aware of is that…
Russian in not a phonetic language
Russian grammar is widely known as the most difficult part of learning Russian. As for English
speaking people in particular, Russian vocabulary is considered to be the second most difficult part
for them, since Russian is a Slavic and not a Germanic language. But why, then, are people who
have learned Russian grammar and vocabulary well enough, still not able to communicate with
native speakers (i.e.: understand their interlocutors or be understood by them clearly)?
The biggest piece of the puzzle here comes from the fact that Russian is NOT a phonetic
language.
A phonetic language is one that is written exactly the way it is pronounced. In a phonetic
language, each sound is written only one way. Because of that, we can guess how to pronounce
words by the way they are written.
It is opposite for any non-phonetic language, such as Russian: a sound can be written in
numerous ways and, vice-versa, a group of letters can be pronounced in different ways, depending
on the word.
In Russian, knowing how to pronounce a word is not enough to write it down. The reverse is true
also: seeing a word in writing is not enough to know how to pronounce it.
This feature of the Russian language explains the majority of problems that people have in
speaking Russian. Unfortunately, it is rarely taken into consideration when teaching Russian. Worst
of all, most language learning is done from text which means that students imagine how Russian is
pronounced, instead of hearing it. Sadly, that is the first way to develop bad habits that will be hard
to get rid of.
Let us briefly compare several languages on the base of their phonetic level. As examples, we
took two of the most phonetic languages – Hungarian and Esperanto – and two languages that are
not phonetic – Russian and English. Then we compared the number of letters in each language’s
alphabet with the number of sounds in each language. The forth column is a percentage that shows
how phonetic each language is. The results are compiled in the following table:
Language Number of letters in the Number of sounds Phonetic
alphabet language, %
Hungarian 44 40 110%
Esperanto 28 33 85%
Russian 33 50 66%
English 26 44 59%
As you see from the table, Hungarian is more than a phonetic language – the number of letters in
the alphabet is even more than the number of sounds in the spoken language. Esperanto is also quite
phonetic – about 85% of its letters sound the way they are written. On the contrary, Russian and
English are almost alike – we can say their alphabets are both roughly 60% phonetic. Moreover, if
we were to compare the number of sounds in a language not only with the number of letters in the
alphabet but, also, with the number of ways those sounds can be written, the difference would be
even bigger!
So… why do we tell you all that? Simply because we want you to understand that this is the true
difficulty of learning Russian pronunciation. We need to keep this difficulty in mind and keep
working on it. If you do not know how to pronounce Russian properly, it is NOT your fault: the
pronunciation of Russian cannot be guessed, it has to be learned.
The function of phonetics
There are two benefits in studying Russian phonetics:
• First, you will learn to better hear spoken Russian;
• Then, you will also learn to better articulate the sounds of Russian and produce the
“music” of the language.
Strictly in this order. You can only pronounce correctly something once you hear it correctly!
Scientists discovered that during the first few months of our lives, we hear and recognize the
sounds of all the languages in the world. Meanwhile, unconsciously, our brains collect different
sorts of statistics about the language around us. Later, when we are 8 to 10 months old, our brains
start optimizing: they stop being able to recognize sounds that are not found in our environment, to
solely focus on the sounds found in the native language around us. Basically, our brain is like any
other muscle – it gets stronger in areas where we use it and weaker in areas where we do not. It
means that there are numerous sounds that we used to be able to hear as infants, but cannot
discriminate anymore as adults.
So what can we do about it? We have to train our ears to hear those sounds again by exposing
ourselves to those sounds again. We need to learn to discriminate between those sounds again, to
distinguish them.
Learning Russian phonetics is challenging at first. For starters, it is rather difficult to find
phonetic transcriptions of Russian words in dictionaries. The pronunciation rules of the Russian text
are rather strict but, at the same time, they are quite complicated and include exceptions. As we saw
above, the pronunciation of Russian letters varies, depending on the word it is in. For example, the
letter "A" can be pronounced in 5 different ways!
Russian phonetics is quite a complex subject in Russian, so we will tackle it gradually, getting
your intuition to work for you. If you listen to all kinds of Russian audio regularly and follow our
instructions, you will be able to “re-acclimate yourself” to hear the difference between all the sounds
of Russian.
There is something satisfying in knowing that your brain never stops learning new things, isn’t
there? It is a very powerful and flexible instrument that we can and should improve and develop
every single day.
Master spoken Russian
This training is a phonetics course of a new kind. Phonetics is an art and a science that teaches us
to detect and reproduce the sounds of a language. It includes the individual sounds of a language
but, also, the “music” of a language, that is: its stress, rhythm and intonation.
Notice that the list here is quite short, which is even better for us, because it can be learned faster:
sounds, stress, rhythm and intonation.
The goal of this training is not to overload you with theories you will never apply. Phonetics is a
field that evolves all the time and where almost everything is subject to debate. Instead, what we
offer you here is a way to discover everything you need to know about Russian phonetics in a
simple, clear, relaxed yet efficient way.
HOW TO USE THE BOOK
Free audio bonus
In this book we offer you to try a special technique to model your pronunciation after that of
native speakers, along with material to practice. To do that, first, please, go on the course web-page
and download the audio content attached to the Lecture 38.
Once you have done that, you are ready for the exercise. The technique itself and the exercise are
described in detail below.
Conventions
In this book we use the following conventions in order to improve your reading experience:
• Every word is transcribed using the IPA symbols (read about this concept in detail in the
next chapter). Such transcriptions are put between two slashes (//) ;
• The stress in a transcription is marked by the “ˈ” symbol;
• Palatalization is marked by the /ʲ/ superscript in transcriptions;
• The stress in a word is marked by underlining the stressed syllable;
• Words or parts of words, we want to draw your attention to, are indicated in bold.
For example:
абсолютно /ɐpsɐˈlʲʉtnə/ absolutely.
INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET
While reading the book, you will notice that every example is transcribed phonetically. Since
Russian is not a phonetic language, it is very useful to have a tool to help us write down words the
way we pronounce them.
That has become possible with the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet, also
known as the IPA. The IPA lets us write any language phonetically. In fact, this alphabet was
originally designed to reform the way we write English. Well, this idea has never been put into
action, but the IPA stayed and today helps us transcribe the pronunciation of all the languages in the
world. If you decide to learn, say, Mandarin, tomorrow, you might be able to learn how to read it
without learning ideograms, but simply using the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the long term,
you would of course want to learn how to read the regular way but, in order to get rid of any doubt,
in the pronunciation of the most important words, the IPA could save you hours and hours of
research. The same can be said of Russian.
So, we will use the IPA in this book mostly for the examples. If you need to check the
pronunciation of some text, or if you want to compare the pronunciation of two words, you can do
so thanks to their phonetic transcriptions. The way the IPA works will be self-evident as you
proceed reading the book. You do not really need to do anything special, just read the examples of
the book and listen to the audio bonuses offered as companions to this book. If you would like to
learn more on the topic, we give you some useful links at the end of the book.
Lastly, we would like to comment on the examples used in the book. We have chosen each
example in such a way that it would really prove useful to you: we mean it, REALLY useful. We
have chosen our examples according to the frequency of their usage in spoken Russian. It means that
after having read this book, you will know how to pronounce and stress correctly over 300 of the
most important words in spoken Russian… simply because you will learn Russian phonetics with
them! This will help you tremendously. You will never find any word in this book that is rare and
cannot be used in speech and would just disrupt your learning process.
USING AN AUDIO EDITOR
We mentioned above that we offer you to try a special technique to work on your pronunciation.
Now, we will describe it in detail.
The exercise is very straightforward: you simply need to repeat after the recording. But! You will
be using a special piece of software to let you do so efficiently. Basically, you can use any type of
an audio editor you know. We recommend you to try the program Audacity.
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor. Go on the official website
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and just download it free of charge. The application is also very easy
to install (simply follow the author’s instructions).
Using an audio editor will let you see sounds in addition to hearing them. It will be a great help to
stay focused, be precise and zoom in on any challenge you face.
Having bought this course, you have also received the opportunity to use the audio tracks. Now is
the right time for this. You have already downloaded audio tracks from the course web-page. Let us
show you how to use it with an example. Imagine you have come across such text:
See MP3 file “00 - Pronounce Russian Properly - Tatiana Kharitonchik - Welcome”
Добро пожаловать на наш тренинг, разработанный специально для тебя – человека,
который хочет говорить по-русски правильно и понятно!
Welcome to our training, designed specifically for you – a person who wants to speak Russian
properly and be easily understood!
Now, follow the instructions:
• Open Audacity and click on File Open.
• Find the bonus folder and open it.
• Choose the file named “Welcome” (it is in MP3 format). That’s it! You are ready to start
the exercise.
You will see that, for each new Russian sound, we have created a table with the most frequent
words that contain that sound. After having read about the articulation of a particular sound, open
the matching MP3 file in Audacity.
We can almost hear your question: why did I have to bother installing a new kind of software if I
already have an audio player? Do not worry; there is a method in our madness. In fact, you are not
