Russian Pronunciation: Stress Training

Welcome to the fourth step in learning to read Russian:

1. Learn the Russian Alphabet 1: The Cyrillic Script
2. Learn the Russian Alphabet 2: Italicized
3. Native Russian Pronunciation 1: Five Difficulties Explained
   a. Stressed/Unstressed Vowel: A Quick Reference Guide
   b. Palatalization in Russian
   c. Special Pronunciations of the Letter {г}
   d. What is the elusive {ё}: fleeting letters
   e. Intonation
4. Native Russian Pronunciation 2: Stress Training Exercises

Like English, Russian has both strong and weak vowels and their pronunciation is different. This guide will help you become accustomed to the patterns through a low pressure step-by-step method.

Now that you've learned about all the hardest aspects of the Russian alphabet and how pronunciation changes, it's time to start training.

In the 26 training exercises that follow, you will learn how to change your vowels according to stress placement. This is really the most important thing about speaking Russian properly.

The translations are not exact and cannot substitute the meaning for how words are used in a sentence: translations are provided just as a general idea of the meaning and are not meant to be memorized. Instead focus on pronunciation only.

The Quick Reference Guide is in the first pronunciation article.

For more in-depth coverage of all the rules, please download my book "Glossika Guide to Russian Pronunciation and Grammar" for free, or get a copy on Google Play books.

Lesson 1: stressed and unstressed а, о, е

Note: the unstressed /ɐ/ is pronounced approximately as the {a} in "about" whereas /ə/ is pronounced like the {o} in "conceive". The /ɐ/ may give you difficulty to hit it straight on especially since Russian native speakers may not be able to isolate it deliberately. You can hear the same sound in stressed position in other languages: the 'a' in Brazilian Portuguese "canto" (but it's nasal), and the 'er' in German "oder". Cantonese is described as having this vowel, as in "人", however this Cantonese vowel is a bit off and sounds different than the Portuguese/German/Russian examples above.

Developers beware: Russian {а, о, е} have different codepoints from English {a, o, e}. You can't search Russian texts with English letters or codepoints. But major search engines have gotten very smart and nowadays on Google you can actually type out whole English phrases with your Russian keyboard on and it will know what you want, and vice versa!

Lesson 2: в as voiced [v] and unvoiced [f]

In every lesson that follows, letters will be introduced in voiced and unvoied pairs. Unvoicing happens at the end of words. If you didn't already know that [v] and [f] were a pair, or that [d] and [t] were a pair (and all the others), it's easy to figure out because your tongue and mouth position are exactly the same. The only difference is that you make voicing sound from your throat for [v] and you don't for [f]. Also notice how the English word "of" is actually pronounced with a [v] sound or how the plural of "knife" is "knives". See! This is a phenomenon of the mouth and doesn't belong to any particular language. It applies to languages all around the world and it's a really cool thing to know.

Lesson 3: л

Note: {л} is just like in English: always light at the beginning of a syllable [l] and always dark at the end of a syllable [ƚ] as in English 'all' and Russian толпа́ вол and волна́. Russian can turn a dark {л} at the end of a syllable into a light {л} by adding the soft sign, which also makes it palatal.

Lesson 4: д as voiced [d] and unvoiced [t]

Lesson 5: с

There is no voicing pair for {с}, which makes it quite different from English, because English often pronounces {s} like [z], as in "as" and "has" and "was", etc. The same thing happens in French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. But not Spanish! And in this regard, Russian acts more like Spanish!

Lesson 6: х

In Russian alphabet articles 1 and 2, we introduced this letter in Roman form as {kh} and also compared it with English {ch} as in "character". Since we're using more IPA in this article, we're going to use the IPA letter [x] which also happens to look exactly like the Russian {х}! But developers beware, different codepoints!

Lesson 7: у as stressed [u] and unstressed [ʊ]

Lesson 8: з as voiced [z] and unvoiced [s]

Lesson 9: м

Lesson 10: н

Lesson 11: г as voiced [g] and unvoiced [k]

Watch out for the one word below where [g] becomes [x]. This is explained here. By the way, the word is "easy".

Lesson 12: ь

Lesson 13: й

Lesson 14: ш

On the IPA chart of the vowels the letter [i] is a front vowel (tongue root pushed forward). The retroflex letter {ш} has a retracted tongue root which actually makes it difficult for a front vowel like [i] to follow easily. This is why /i/ and /ɪ/ turn into [ɨ], the retracted version. By the way, [ɨ] is essentially the same as {ы}.

Lesson 15: ж as voiced [ž] and unvoiced [š]

Same thing happening here with {ж} as with {ш} in the last lesson causing front vowels to become [ɨ]. Also take note that the combination {зж} palatalizes the sequence, hence becoming [źź] as explained in my previous Russian pronunciation article- Native Russian Pronunciation 1: Five Difficulties Explained.

Lesson 16: я as stressed [ja] and unstressed [ʲə]

Notice here that when {я} is surrounded by two palatal consonants, they push the vowel forward to [æ] as in the word for 'five': пять. This has less to do with Russian and more to do with the physics of the tongue vs time/speed: since [ʲ] is a high-front glide, the word in question wants the tongue to reverse direction all the way to a low-back [a] and then reverse direction yet again all the way back to a high-front [ʲ]. Because of the speed at which people speak, they don't go all the way back, instead it's a fluid motion from high > low > high, all maintained with a forward tongue root, which means the [a] now sounds like [æ].

Reflexive Verbs ending in {-ться} are pronounced [tsə].

Lesson 17: б as voiced [b] and unvoiced [p]

Lesson 18: ч

This letter is palatal {ć}. It is not equivalent to English {ch} which is what most beginners of Russian equate it to. It is much closer to the {tu} sound in "future" unless you pronounce that with a full {ch}. Try keeping the tip of the tongue down with the bottom teeth when saying this letter.

Lesson 19: щ

I'm going to repeat what I posted in the alphabet article about this letter in case you didn't see it.

A lot of old textbooks teach this letter transcribed as the compound "shch", but I'm afraid that this is misleading because the Russian language is in a state of flux. Research was done as far back as the 1960s and found only about 20% of the population still had such a hypercorrect pronunciation and only among the elderly at that. Today it has all but vanished. Today the letter sounds just like the Croatian or Polish ś.

Lesson 20: ё

Lesson 21: ы

Lesson 22: ц

Lesson 23: ю as stressed [ʲu] and unstressed [ʲʊ̈]

Lesson 24: э

Lesson 25: ф

Lesson 26: г as voiced /v/

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You've now completed the all four steps to learning the Russian alphabet and its pronunciation; it's time for you to put the basics that you've learned so far into practice. Start training with us on our platform and learn to perfect your Russian pronunciation with Glossika's Russian course as recorded by native speakers.

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