Introductory phonetics course

Pronunciation --> Phonetics course

The work with this course will help you to be able to perceive and distinguish sounds of the Russian language, as well as to have an idea how to pronounce them. This is only the first step to a proper Russian pronunciation. In order to improve your pronunciation, you can work with phrases and dialogues from Everyday Russian Course on our site. When working with phrases, you should devote attention not only to the pronunciation of sounds and words, but also to the intonation of the whole phrase.

Russian phonetics lessons

  • Lesson 1. Vowel sounds
    This lesson is devoted to the 5 Russian vowel sounds which are usually not very difficult to pronounce for English speaking people.
  • Lesson 2. Hard consonants
    The lesson is devoted to hard Russian consonant sounds that are very similar to the consonant sounds of English.
  • Lesson 3. Soft consonants
    The main purpose of this lesson is to demonstrate the difference between hard and soft consonant sounds.
  • Lesson 4. The most difficult sounds
    This lesson covers consonant and vowel sounds which present the biggest difficulty for those who learn Russian.

The lessons of this course are designed for English speaking persons, taking into account the peculiarities of the Russian phonetic system.

At the beginning of every lesson you will find exercises to train the pronunciation of isolated sounds and syllables. After that, there are exercises containing Russian words with these sounds. Notice that most Russian words that you can meet in the phonetics course are borrowed words from other languages, names of people or names of countries, states and cities, so you can guess what they mean without reading their translation.

Before working with this phonetics course it is recommended to visit pages Basic Russian sounds and General Info about Russian Sounds.