How to read and pronounce Russian words

The first challenge in Russian pronunciation is to become familiar with Russian sounds and letters and start reading separate words. Although Russian alphabet and Russian phonetics may look daunting to begin with, you will be surprised soon that you can recognize the letters and can even read the words. To improve your reading skills you will need to practise reading Russian as much as possible. Reading exercises should be included on a regular basis into your lessons activities.

Even if your Russian course is focused on listening and speaking, one of the best ways of learning new words is by writing them down, and then memorising them. For this we would recommend you to become familiar with Russian handwritten forms, which are a little different from printed letters. Learning them straight away may seem like an extra difficulty, but your efforts will be rewarded later when you find yourself writing in Russian easily!

Stress and vowels

In dictionaries the stressed syllable in words of more than one syllable is marked with an acute accent. In books for Russian native speakers stress is not marked as native speaker know where it falls.

Stress has an important effect on the pronunciation of some vowels. The following points are vital to your understanding and speaking of Russian:

• an unstressed о sounds something like 'ah'
• an unstressed e sounds something like 'i' or 'yi'
• an unstressed я before the stressed syllable sounds like 'i' or 'yi'

Thus the word оно , will sound like 'ah-no', the word еда sounds like 'yi-da'.

To learn more please contact Natalia at nataly_roberts@yahoo.co.uk or call 07895487517 (daily from 9:00am till 9:00pm).