Serafima Gettys - Russian For Dummies

This isn’t to say, however, that English and Russian sounds are completely the same; they absolutely aren’t. (See the later section “ Sounding Like a Real Russian with Proper Pronunciation” for details.) But because your chances of learning to sound like a real Russian just by reading this book are rather slim, we use what phoneticians call approximation and consider most English sounds and their Russian counterparts to be the same, as long as native speakers of Russian have no difficulty recognizing them. Yes, Russians will discern your accent as not being authentic, but at the very least, they’ll be able to understand you!

Table 2-1has the details on Cyrillic letters. In the first column, you see the uppercase and lowercase versions of the letter, respectively. The second column shows how the Russian letters are pronounced, using familiar English letters and example words. The third column of the table indicates whether the letter is a vowel or a consonant:

You may remember from your English classes that vowels are the sounds that are usually said with an open mouth, without stopping the flow of air coming from the lungs. The English letters A, E, I, O, and U are vowels.

Letters like B, K, L, M, N, P, and T are consonants: They’re all pronounced with some sort of obstruction that gets in the way of the air coming out of your lungs.

You may wonder why you need this information — another burden for your poor memory! Believe it or not, knowing whether the sound is a vowel or a consonant comes in handy in helping you understand some very important grammatical rules as you delve deeper into the language.

Play Track 1 to hear the pronunciation of the Russian alphabet.

Note the letter Ййin Table 2-1. Scholars don’t agree on this one: Some believe it’s a consonant; others think it’s a vowel. We don’t want to take sides in this matter, so we list it as both a consonant and a vowel.

Our advice for you is to first divide the alphabet into three or even four parts of about nine or ten letters. Go over each part as many times as necessary to memorize letter-sound correspondences while you listen to Track 1. (We provide extra help in the later section “ Sounding Like a Real Russian with Proper Pronunciation.”) Test yourself a couple of times: Cover the pronunciation column in Table 2-1, and say out loud the sound that corresponds to each Russian letter. If you forget a sound, you can peek at the corresponding English letter. Keep at it until you can say each letter. And keep the table handy for future reference!

TABLE 2-1The Russian Alphabet