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 Course of Russian 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.
If you are a registered user, you can review the results of the exercises and tests you have done during the lessons. See the Registration page
Taking into account the peculiarities of the Russian phonetic system, the phonetics course is designed in the following way:
Here you can find a brief description of these lessons:
Lesson 1. Vowel sounds
This lesson is devoted to 5 vowel sounds which are usually not very difficult to pronounce for English speaking people. In the last lesson, "The most difficult sounds" you will find one more vowel sound [i].
Lesson 2. Hard consonants
Hard consonant sounds of the Russian language are very similar to the consonant sounds of English. While doing the exercises in this lesson, you should take into account that Russian consonants are pronounced with less tension than in English.
Lesson 3. Soft consonants
The main purpose of this lesson is to demonstrate the phonetic difference between hard and soft consonant sounds in the Russian language.
Lesson 4. The most difficult sounds
This lesson covers consonant and vowel sounds which have nothing in common with English sounds and present the biggest difficulty for those who learn Russian.
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.