Pronunciation of the Soft Sign [ь] in the Russian Language

Russian learners often struggle with the letter ц. Unlike familiar sounds in English, ц makes the sharp “ts” sound heard in words like цапля and цыпленок. Mastering this new articulation can seem daunting. But what if I told you there’s a tasty English word that can help you practice that troublesome ц? That word is…

In one of my previous lesson we were learning the Russian alphabet. I hope you remember how to pronounce them. Now we’re going to put the letters together to get new words. Easy point of reading in Russian is that every letter corresponds to only one sound. Most of the time. There are some exceptions which…

There are 10 vowels in the Russian language: А, Е, Ё, И, О, У, Ы, Э, Ю, Я. Quite a big variety. But, at least, in most situations one vowel corresponds to one sound. It makes the learning process much easier. We’ve already learnt the Russian alphabet, so now let’s remember how we pronounce the…

If you want to learn Russian, you need to begin with the alphabet. Otherwise, the ability of reading will be impossible. I can tell you that reading in Russian is simple if you know the pronounciation of every letter. The words are made of letters, which are like bricks. You just put them together to…

For English speakers it may be difficult to pronunce the [r] sound in Russian. As you might know, the Russian letter for this sound is, surprisingly, р. It is not [p] sound as in English, it’s a trilled [r]. If you ever learnt Spanish, you are probably familiar with this sound. The way Americans pronounce…

Russian is hard. You can learn the alphabet in some minutes, but reading and pronouncing can make you crazy. Particularly with regard to some “annoying” words. When determining the “difficulty” of a word, one can be guided by the number of letters and the number of words from which it is composed, since the longest…