Want to sound Russian? Watch this now.

[@Dave5400]

Ah, of course. The only two permissible liquids in a cup: Tea, or vodka.

[@AuLit_ru]

Hi! Thank you for the video :) You pronounce "for example" with sound [e] "игземпл" but actually many students at the beginning of their learning pronounce it like Russian "a" because they see letter "a" 😄 And they often forget to use linking "r", so it's like "фо игзампл". Or I often hear "as" pronounced as "ас" :) I'm talking of beginner and elementary students mainly. And of course the problem with nasal "ng", they always say "нк" or "нг" :) But as far as more advanced students are concerned, they never sound that dreadful anymore as in Soviet times and as in this video :))) (unless they want to make jokes and imitate this accent on purpose). Because nowadays English is all over the place so they get used to its sounding quicker through videos and computer games. Anyway, I'm Russian and I'm not in the least offended by the video because I understand your intentions :) Love your videos, please continue your work :)

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Yes, this is based on what I heard from Soviet-educated people when I lived in Russia in the late 90s. Best version for foreign learners of Russian though.

[@nuodso]

Sometimes Russian speakers don't assimilate /nk/ to [ŋk] but pronounce [nk] instead in my experience, and some always pronounce a k/g in orthographic .

[@HuckleberryHim]

Ah, the difference between [nk] and [ŋk], a super clear and noticeable difference, jumps out at you right away!

[@nuodso]

@@HuckleberryHim It actually does because it's so weird.

[@haunter6682]

Russian doesn't have the nasal [ŋ] sound, so Russians learning English have to specifically learn to make this sound and use it instead of the [ng] and [nk] (made of two separate consonants with maybe even a tiny schwa in between) commonly used in Russian.

[@nuodso]

@@haunter6682 Точно.

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

I may have talked about this on one of your other posts; if so, please forgive the repetition. When I started studying Russian, a friend of mine who had already studied for a few years advised me that a very good way of getting a good pronunciation in Russian was to imitate Russian people speaking English. He suggested listening to the outgoing message from the Soviet Consul. He was right! Someone with a very strong accent had recorded the message, and his opening “hello“ was a lesson in itself. It covered the pronunciation of X, the unstressed E, the hard Л, and the diphthongal O.

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@dancinggiraffe6058 yes, I think that’s a great method since it separates the pronunciation from the need to remember the words.

[@haunter6682]

The Crazy Russian Dad yt channel is a nice place for this kind of practice. I can't even call it an accent really. He basically speaks English using the system of sounds from the Russian language instead of English.

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

@@haunter6682 I just watched Crazy Russian Dad for the first time. It’s great! I even remembered a couple of things about Russian pronunciation that I’d forgotten.

[@SketchyTigers]

сэнк ю дэйв фор зис вандерфул туториал)))

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

Xa xa xa! When I stayed with a family in Moscow, I was out one day with the son, an English speaking student, when my mother called and got the non-English-speaking mother. My mother knew enough Russian to be able to identify herself and to understand that I was not at home. So the next day, when we went out, my friend wrote out a message that his mother could read phonetically in case my mother phoned again. The message explains that the speaker was Vladimir‘s mother, that we were out and would be back after 8 PM, and that my mother should try again after that. When we got home, Vladimir’s mother said that after she read the message, my mother laughed, said she understood everything, and thanked her. And yes, my mother did phone me back after 8 PM.

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@dancinggiraffe6058 Fantastic story!

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@SketchyTigers Йю ар вери велком!

[@МарияКайгородова-ч8х]

Я не поняла, что вам здесь понравилось? Издевка от Дэйва над чужой культурой. Очень жаль.

[@AuLit_ru]

@@МарияКайгородова-ч8х но это же не издёвка 🤷‍♀️ Жаль, что вы так восприняли, но это не было целью этого или других подобных видео.

[@realboinger]

Great fun!!

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

Отлично! I’ve been to Russia three times and stayed with Russian families, some of whose members spoke English. I also have a number of friends here in San Francisco who came from Russia. You sound just like them. I was especially glad to hear your stressed O, which approaches a diphthong. I noticed that little kids tended to exaggerate sounds. One of the families I stayed with had a three-year-old who, when he said “Чего?” made it sound like “Чегоa?” I also appreciated your explanation of the two different pronunciations of the unstressed 0.

[@stariyczedun]

"чивооа" 😀

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@dancinggiraffe6058 Yes, I love Russian Os.

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

@@stariyczedun точно!

[@bhami]

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages And in contrast, as an American, I hate the long "o" of Kiwis and many Brits, which is almost a quadraphthong containing every vowel *except* an actual "o". 😀

[@bhami]

A good example might be KZbinr Simon Whistler (is he up to 20 different channels yet?)

[@MrKotBonifacy]

Шутчик Вы, уважаемый Дейв... : ) But yes, this "heavy Russian accent" sounds kinda funny even in ears of other Slavic speakers, and the most bizarre part of it is many of them Russians don't even try to get that in English "back", bag" and "beg" are not exactly the same words AND it matters how one pronounces them... "Mind Your Language" comes to mind, but then yes, "four candles..." ;-) Cheers!

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Glad you enjoyed it.

[@stariyczedun]

As a Russian who speaks English at work, your Russian accent sounds a bit forced to me. Russians who can formulate coherent sentences in English usually have no problems pronouncing some kind of English-passing R. I recall at school the only children who had problems with that were the ones, who had German as the first foreign language subject and then switched to English later on. Vowels are a different beast. We almost never get them right 🙂 I'm still struggling with pronouncing long and short vowels distinctly and I started to learn English when I was 7. Great video as usual! Really love your work, Dave.

[@stariyczedun]

I still feel uneasy sometimes saying "can't" because it might sound the same as the other word 😅

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@stariyczedun Thank you! I think it has to be a bit over the top to help people who are learning the language. My version is based on some of my Russian former colleagues who were very proud of the English they’d learnt in Soviet times though.

[@stariyczedun]

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I started school in 1996, things regarding foreign languages in school were in transition. Late Soviet schools had a duopoly of German and English. My mum had only German, my father only English. When I went to school, we were separated into "classes" by our supposed intelligence (I'm not sure how they measured that but that's what we had been told). Classes with German as the first foreign language were considered to be not the brightest. When I finished school in 2006, German wasn't even an option in most schools in Russia - it's all English now. This and the advent of internet and computer games really sealed the deal. For really exaggerated Russian accent one can find the speech of then minister of sports Mutko "let me speak from my heart" - it was so bad it became a meme. But it wouldn't become one if he wasn't an outlier.

[@dmitryglushenko2624]

Дэйв, добрый день. Очень интересное видео, спасибо! You make a particularly interesting point about the loose lips at the end of the video. Would you agree though that the Russian R sounds closer to the alveolar tap rather than to full blown rhotic, at least if you've heard the way native Russians pronounce it? Thanks again, enjoy watching your stuff

[@Matthew.Morycinski]

As in other Slavic languages, it is a tap in everyday speech. It is fully rolled only when someone wants to REALLY emphasize something.

[@ArtemiiPlekhanov]

My chap there is no u/ю sound in fruits it should be like Russian "у" letter (фрут). * go back to drink vodka on my nuclear reactor*

[@Matthew.Morycinski]

It's one of the most difficult things to learn in Russian language. Somtimes hard/non-palatalized pronunciation really is meant to be so.

[@WiltshireMan]

Very good Dave, you certainly sounded like a Russian to me :)

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@WiltshireMan thank you !

[@sanchoodell6789]

This is a very good video comrade. You should sell the Mirov II, A RRevolutionaRy spoRts tuRbo from the Soviet Union!

[@notwithouttext]

0:49 in addition, seeing that the reason why the nato phonetic alphabet exists is to make letters clearer, it would be unusual for a voice recognition system to be confused by "/w/ictor" also, i have noticed v to w in ukrainian accents, which is interesting because russian and ukrainian do opposite things in this case

[@stariyczedun]

Man, I'd love to hear Dave's take on Ukranian accent as well. It is something special - I had some Ukrainian colleagues who couldn't helped but pronounced "-ing" endings as "-inkh".

[@rudyberkvens-be]

Belley cramps 🎉😅😂

[@dancinggiraffe6058]

Here’s something that doesn’t have to do with how Russians pronounce English; rather, it’s about how some Russians I’ve met in San Francisco pronounce a Russian word the way they think that Americans pronounce it. In the 1980s and 90s I had several Russian friends. They, as well all of their Russian friends, pronounced ruble and rubles to rhyme with bubble and bubbles! I don’t know how that got started - whether someone actually heard an American pronounce it that way or whether someone figured that it should be pronounced that way because of how “rub” is pronounced. But I picture all of these newly arrived Russians being told by those who already lived here that they should try to pronounce it the way Americans supposedly do. I wonder whether this has happened in other Russian communities in the US or other English-speaking countries.

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

I've heard Russians call their currency Rubble when speaking English in Russia too. I wonder if it was actually taught like that in Soviet schools, like the whole generation of Chinese kids who were taught to say "Long live Chairman Mao", rhyming 'live' with 'five'.

[@sikanuasa9958]

Interesting! Why do you think this is?

[@RoxanneM-]

😂🤣I didn’t remember what this channel was about and I unsubscribed immediately. 😅 No worries, I subscribed again. 💙

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

@@RoxanneM- I’m glad you realised in time.

[@БогданКостюченко-ц4о]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/aGjLpKKXnbqYnqcsi=BzVf8sG4O1BW53fX&t=370 But in RP "suit" was /sju:t/ and "suitable" was /'sju:təbl/ and some conservative English speakers might still pronounce them this way, it's not really a Russian accent. Though even in the most old-fashioned, posh RP "Bruce" was /bru:s/, not /brju:s/, and "blues" was /blu:z/, not /blju:z/, though "blues" (music genre) is "блюз" in Russian and Ukrainian. Oh, and you pronounced "education" like "еджукейшен" (if we imagine it spelt in Cyrillic), but since U in English should always be pronounced /ju:/ as you mentioned later in the video, then it should be "едюкейшен", then it would sound similar to old-fashioned RP, /ˌɛdjʊˈkeɪʃən/, but with a Russian flavour. :-D kzbin.info/www/bejne/aGjLpKKXnbqYnqcsi=WyapAPPU2oixpqhS&t=5

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Some good points. My /'sju:təbl/ story comes from the fact that colleagues in Russia insisted on my wife, Susan's, name badge being written as Сьюзан. When she questioned this, their reaction was almost one of pity that she didn't know how to pronounce her own name.

[@БогданКостюченко-ц4о]

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Ah, yes, "Susan" is translated "Сьюзан" into Russian and Ukrainian. That's why I used to think that "Susan" is pronounced /'sju:zən/ in English. But it seems that it was not standard even a century ago because Daniel Jones in his "English Pronouncing Dictionary" gave /'su:zn/ as the only pronunciation of "Susan", though he placed /'sju:təbl/ and /sju:t/ as the first pronunciations for "suitable" and "suit" (and /su:/ without /j/ as alternative). Also curious that it was normal to pronounce "chemist" and "chemistry" /ˈkɪmɪst/ and /ˈkɪmɪstrɪ/ at the beginning of the 20th century. Daniel Jones in "An Outline of English Phonetics" written in 1918 says that "chemist" is pronounced /ˈkɪmɪst/ or /ˈkemɪst/, but then in 1960s he says that the /ˈkɪmɪst/ pronunciation, which was normal at the beginning of the 20th century, is "now nearly obsolete". In Russian in its turn it was normal to pronounce "ходят" [ˈxodʲʊt], as if it were spelt "ходют", in the first half of the 20th century, but now it's pronounced [ˈxodʲət] and [ˈxodʲʊt] is rare and not considered standard anymore. Pronunciation changes over time. By the way, I've just remembered the reconstruction of Benjamin Franklin you gave in the video about American English where "truth" is pronounced /trju:θ/ so probably not only /'sju:zən/ but even /brju:s/ and /blju:z/ was normal back then, what do you think? Then our translation of English names is just very, very conservative, so conservative that it's archaic.

[@БогданКостюченко-ц4о]

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I'd like to add that we pronounce "Cuba" and "cube" or "music" and "mutant" without /j/ in Russian and Ukrainian so they're "Куба", "куб, "музыка" ("музика" in Ukrainian) and "мутант", not "Кюба", "кюб", "мюзыка" and "мютант". But "musical" does have /j/, it's "мюзикл", not "музикл". That's because we've got the word "musical", as the noun meaning a film with singing and dancing or a Broadway show, from English.

[@daedhe5732]

Seeing how many people agree with the author, I must assume this nasalized Hollywood pronunciation is imitating some actual features of the Russian phonology, but I would definitely never ever confuse it with an actual heavy accent of a native Russian speaker.

[@haunter6682]

As a native Russian, the Hollywood attempts at Russian accents are a travesty and make me physically cringe every time

[@stariyczedun]

Is it intonation? I have an uncanny valley feeling from it, it sounds "Russian" and doesn't sound familiar at the same time. Like I couldn't imagine anyone I knew to speak like that, something is off.

[@DianeRoma1]

The H is pronounced two ways. (Hollywood) Russian Christians will say Golivood and a Russian Jew will say Xolivood. You should teach actors to do proper accents as you do it better than anyone else. Interestingly enough, I’m from Russia but never had that accent. I went from having an English accent to California accent within few years.

[@verysmoky3605]

That's not a Jewish or Christian thing, it's a Southern Russian/Ukrainian thing. The Jewish russophones I know (mostly from Saint Petersburg/Baltics) would pronounce it "Gollywood". Listen to how Gorbachev spoke and you'll hear this.

[@Bacopa68]

Walter Koenig based his accent on Lithuanian accents he had been exposed to.

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Yes, I read that they wanted his accent to be a bit over the top to provide a comic element to the show, so he based the V thing on an aspect of his father's speech.

[@Bacopa68]

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Despite his German last name his father's first language was Lithuanian. He got on Star Trek because fans wanted a Russian character and the network wanted a short young guy with an accent to compete with Davey Jones. The Monkees was on opposite Star Trek.

[@brucequinn]

At vim of actor!!!

[@МарияКайгородова-ч8х]

I'm Яussian, and got the joke, but one minute of this circus would have been perfectly enough. I do not understand why such a great specialist like Dave would want to waste so much effort to demonstrate how dreadfully 😢 a foreigner (not neccesary Russian) may sound to an English native speaker. Where cultures meet one needs remember about respect...

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

I'm really sorry that this came across as disrespectful to you. That certainly was not my intention. The purpose of these videos , as I stated in the description, is to help actors preparing for roles and to help language learners acquire better pronunciation. In this case, learners of Russian can isolate the phonology from the rest of the language. It might also be helpful for Russian learners of English to be aware of some of the issues they may have.

[@adamwishneusky]

AI images 👎

[@resourceress7]

Yes, but I thought they were funny.

[@henrikr8183]

Next I'd love to see a Chinese accent

[@notwithouttext]

yaussian

[@mikewilliamson6419]

Второй

[@DrVuilnisbak]

Первый

[@toddverbeek5113]

The Al images ripping off the work of human artists cheapen your video.

[@Conservewood]

Better get used to it

[@Man_Raised_By_Puffins]

Orcish

[@haunter6682]

This guide may be geared more towards imitating the accent of older people who've learned English in the USSR. For younger people like me, the school programme for English actually dives into pronunciation almost at the very beginning, teaching kids how to pronounce [ŋ], [ð], [θ], [w] and the English version of R, so we do pronounce those correctly when we want to sound right. I wouldn't say young people don't use any articles at all. We just don't have enough of an intuition for when to include or not include an article, and which one to use. So, in commonly-used, well-established phrases, the article usage would be correct, but in more complicated improvisatory speech, off the beaten path, issues would start to arise. (If you're curious, look up the in-depth rules for article usage in some Russian English textbooks, they're insane. For example, I think there's a rule of using "the" with geographical names for any bodies of water except lakes) Another neat trick would be not to pronounce ng and nk as [ŋ], [ŋg] or [ŋk], but to separate the two consonants: [ng] or [nk], maybe even put a tiny little schwa in between. (There's no nasal ŋ sound in Russian, and to a native Russian person the difference is pretty negligible.) Also, in words that end with -ing, the effect combines with the de-voicing of the final consonant, and [..ɪŋ] turns into [...ɪnk]. What sounded the most "off" to me in this video was the way Dave artificially turned some consonants in his English speech into the Russian hard or soft consonants. I don't think we do it at all before [e], the "ten" and "hanging" at 5:20 sounded very wrong to me, I'd pronounce it way closer to [тэ], [хэ] than to [те], [хе]. The softening seems to happen so noticeably only before [juː] and [iː]. Generally, if we think of the Russian hardness and softness as the polar ends of a spectrum, our pronunciation of the English consonants tends to be somewhere in between, like: [мун]--------------[moon]-----------------------------[мюн] [бэд]-----------[bad]--------------[bed]--------------[бед] A related thing I've noticed is: because [ы] doesn't exist in English at all, I tend to have trouble differentiating between [ɪ] and [iː], for example, "a bit of beet" is a tough thing for me to pronounce. Also, something that instantly gives away an English native trying to speak Russian or fake a Russian accent is an extra [j] sound subtly sneaking in between a soft consonant and the vowel that softens it: at 6:26 it made [брюс] turn into [брйюс], at 0:11 [ðис] got made into [ðйис], at 1:55 we hear "коррьект" instead of "коррект". That [j] sound shouldn't be there. For the Russian vowel letters АОУЫЭ and ЯЁЮИЕ, a clear difference in vowel sounds exists only between Ы and И. The letters ЯЁЮЕ just mean "the same sound as АОУЭ but with softening power". And if (and only if) there's no preceding consonant to soften, the sound [j] gets artificially put in front of the vowel, as a placeholder to demonstrate that softening power and to clarify which vowel letter is used here. And we run into this exact situation when we showcase the letters ЯЁЮЕ on their own.

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

Hi. Thanks so much for this in-depth analysis. Yes, a lot of my input for this was colleagues who learned English in Soviet times - some of who did seem to think that native speakers got it wrong. (I heard the same attitude at Cambridge University, where I was told they didn't encourage French language students to take a year abroad since French people no longer speak correct French! - I chose not to study there).

[@Matthew.Morycinski]

[ы] does exist in English, the English speakers just don't recognize it as a separate vowel. The y in the word "myth" is exactly the same sound. The only difficulty is that English has no words that begin or end on [ы], although "it" comes close.