How to Do a Russian Accent. A Phonetics Guide

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Everybody who sets out to sound Russian starts with the rolled р (r) and the throaty х (kh). They are the audible ones, the ones a film accent is built from, and they are worth learning.

They are also not what gives an English speaker away, which took me a while to accept. Two much quieter things do that, and most people never hear either of them.

Say your best Russian sentence into your phone. What gives you away is almost certainly one of the two below, and neither is the one you have been working on.

One of them is that most Russian consonants come in pairs, hard and soft, and the soft one is made with the middle of your tongue pushed up toward the roof of your mouth while you say it. It is not a separate sound. It is the same consonant with the tongue in a different shape, and it applies to most of them, with a handful that only ever come one way. The other is that English speakers puff air after p, t, and k, while Russian releases those consonants clean, which is the smaller of the two and the easier to hear once somebody points at it.

Hard and soft, and why the difference is not optional

Hold your hand in front of your mouth and say the English word top, then say stop. The first gives you a small burst of air after the t and the second barely any, because the sound sits after an s. I have been doing that my whole life, one student said with his hand still up, which is the usual reaction. That second version is roughly what Russian t sounds like everywhere, every time, in every position.

That puff is not a variant in Russian; it is an accent.

Hard and soft is the larger of the two. Take the pair мать (mat’) and мат (mat), or быть (byt’) and быт (byt). Same consonants on paper, different words, and the only difference is whether the tongue arches upward as the consonant is released. I could hear that they were different and I could not tell you how, one student told me in his second month, which is the normal experience. He spent three weeks convinced the difference was in the vowel, because that is where his ear went looking, and the day it finally landed he laughed out loud in the middle of a lesson. Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Students get there by ignoring the consonant entirely. Say the vowel that follows it first, exaggerated, then attach the consonant to the front of it. The tongue gets into position for the vowel and the consonant inherits the shape.

The sound English does not have anywhere

Then there is ы (y), which has no English equivalent at all and which people quietly substitute with the vowel from see for years without noticing. It isn’t that sound. It is made further back, with the tongue bunched toward the middle of the mouth rather than pushed forward, and the lips completely unrounded.

A sound you do not already own cannot be reached by listening harder.

This one I found by accident. A student was holding the vowel in the English word good, stretching it out while she worked on something else, and her lips came unrounded partway through without her noticing. What came out was close enough to ы that we both stopped. She had not moved her tongue at all. So it is not a vowel I already own, a student said when this finally landed. That is exactly it, and it explains why listening alone does not fix it.

Vowels move when the stress moves

Russian stress is not written down, it shifts between forms of the same word, and it changes the vowels around it. An unstressed о (o) is not a shorter о. It becomes something closer to а (a), and further from the stress it reduces further still. English speakers who pronounce every vowel as it is spelled produce something that sounds careful and wrong at the same time. It sounds like I am reading it out to a child, one student said about her own recording, and she was right.

The letters give you the word. They do not give you the sound of it.

This is the part that makes reading aloud misleading, because the page gives you the letters and not the stress, a problem our assessment of the apps goes into in more detail. Nobody told me the letters lie, one student said, and I’ve thought about that phrasing ever since. They don’t lie. They are simply not a recording.

Why I can hear my own accent and cannot remove it

I’ve taught English for years and I speak it every day, and I have an accent in it that any American identifies within a sentence or two.

Hearing it is easy. I know exactly which sounds do it: my w drifts toward v when I stop paying attention, my th is imperfect under pressure, and my sentence rhythm stays Russian no matter which words I put in it, which is the one I would most like to fix and the one I have never managed to shift by a single degree in all the years I have been trying. Knowing all of that has reduced it slightly and hasn’t removed any of it.

What that taught me is worth more to my students than any exercise. An accent is not a defect to be eliminated before you are allowed to speak. It is a feature of every adult who learned a language after childhood, including the ones who are entirely fluent, and the goal is being understood without effort rather than being mistaken for a native.

A pronunciation nobody has to work to follow is reachable. The last five percent past that is a project nobody but you is listening for.

Students who worry most about their accent are usually the ones whose pronunciation is already fine, and that pattern is close enough to the fear of speaking that they are often the same problem wearing different clothes. At Palme School we teach adults online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those through the button above, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a Russian accent sound Russian?

Mostly two things nobody notices they are doing: soft consonants, where the middle of the tongue rises toward the roof of the mouth, and the absence of the puff of air English puts after p, t, and k.

What is the hardest Russian sound for English speakers?

The vowel ы, because English has nothing close to it and most people substitute the vowel from see for years without hearing the difference. Soft consonants are harder in total but easier to approximate.

How do I roll my Russian r?

Start with a single tap rather than a trill, which is what many Russian speakers use in ordinary speech anyway. It is also the least important of the sounds on this page.

Can adults lose their accent completely?

Almost never, and it is the wrong goal. Aim for a pronunciation that costs the listener no effort, which is reachable, rather than being mistaken for a native, which mostly is not.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.