Language Overview: Russian 

Lol you absolutely butchered those ДЬ and ТЬ in the beginning, they sounded like ДЖЬ and ЧЬ. Anyway watching you trying to pronounce Russian sounds was great, nothing better than westerners breaking their tongues. And those memes in that weird broken Russian, man it's just perfect. Thanks for the vid!

Weirdness around numbers in Russian is due to historical dual form of nouns

There would be an issue with spelling "йогурт" as "ёгурт", actually (in fact, Belarusian does it exactly like that, as it happens!) While to Slavic laymen it seems like there should be no issue there, once you learn a bit about the etymology and history of the letter "ё", you'll see it quite clearly. You see, "ё" is not just the iotated/softened version of the letter "о", as you might expect. Proto-Slavic never actually had the "yo" cluster in any native words, so in the early days there was never a need to have a iotated letter to represent this - "yo" has arrived to Slavic languages only later, via borrowings from other languages, "yoghurt" being a perfect example of such a word - that's why even Russian uses "йо" to spell it. In other places it uses "ио" too, as a direct transliteration of Latin "io", in words such as "radio", for instance. "Ё" is pronounced exactly the same, and it is indeed confusing even to some Russians why you write "ё" in some words, and "йо" in others. So basically, "ё" is a letter that was made specifically and exclusively to denote a particularly Russian sound shift, which occurred only in Russian and Belarusian - where "е" (or the "ye" sound) in stressed positions transforms into the "yo" sound (a very similar though separate process has also occurred in Polish, but not stress-related, so it's often in different positions). Because, like you said yourself, stress in Russian is completely unpredictable, Russians learn it by heart. That's why they often don't write the letter "ё" at all, and just write "е" instead - except when needing to disambiguate between words where there's different stress, which alters the meaning - and in this sole case also the pronunciation of the vowel - like in все/всё. In other words, Russians just know that every "е" that happens to be stressed, should be read as "yo" - and for that reason don't bother writing the diaeresis above the letter. It's often written in texts for learners though, alongside acute accents above other vowels to show that they're to be stressed. Anyhow, the above explains why the letter looks like "e", even though in phonological terms it's supposed to represent more of a "soft o" sound, which some find confusing. Belarusian, on the other hand - like I mentioned in the beginning - completely ignores all of the above - its orthography being much more phonemic than Russian's - and it uses the letter "ё" everywhere, at all times, even in words where Russian would use "йо" or "io" in - also for this reason the letter is mandatory and written at all times, unlike in Russian. So for instance the word "radio" will be "радыё" in Belarusian, while it's "радио" in Russian. It is convenient for everyday folks because of less orthographical rules to remember, but it's very grating to anyone who knows the first thing about Slavic etymology. Speaking of etymology - indeed, in all words you have "ё" in, other Slavic languages will have a simple "e" sound (soft or hard, depending on some factors). That's why the letter looks like "e", only with a diaeresis. As a bonus piece of trivia - some of you might wonder why the letter "Ю" corresponds to "yu", and not to "yo", as one might expect. Well, that's for two reasons: the first being that Cyrillic was based on the Greek alphabet, more particularly Greek with modern spelling rules (yes, Greek was already at that stage when Cyrillic was invented). In modern Greek, to convey the "u" phoneme, you can't just write the letter upsilon (υ) - the sound of that letter alone has shifted to "i". You need to use a digraph: ου. And it was the exact same story for early Cyrillic - for the "u" sound it had the digraph "оу" - which was considered a single character and is even available in Unicode as such, but is completely identical when written just by putting an "о" and a "у" next to each other. The second reason is that like I said before, there is no "yo" cluster in native Slavic words. The iotated version of "оу" was "іоу" -> юу". And then people just shortened it by dropping the final "у" because again, there were no words containing "yo", so there was nothing to confuse it with! That's why the letter looks like io, but is read as iu :D

I have never heard anyone questioning Russian palatalized consonants being separate phonemes in their own. What i heard is the dispute over whether ы is a separate vowel or not.

3:21 someday I'll see an English speaking person who got ы right lmao.

Contrary to popular opinions, the hardest part of learning russian is learning noun declension and stress placement. Some words are so unpredictable, that native speakers constantly diverge from official standards. Stress just hops around wherever it wants, and even affects nouns' plural marking, for example try asking a native speaker what's the plural for "во́зраст" and you'll get answered with "возраста́" (the -ы/и ending turns into -а/я when stressed), even though official standards say it's actually "во́зрасты" and the stress doesn't hop, which sounds really weird to a native speaker. There's also this word "дно́" which is from the category of neuter nouns in which -о irregularly turns into -ья instead of -а in plural, and the remaining part "дн-" gets an epenthetic vowel inserted, which also gets stressed, so the plural form is a weird "до́нья"

yes you can say "Кота Сыр" as well as "Сыр Кота". It´s less common but totally possible.

As a native Russian speaker from Kazakhstan it was a pleasure to watch a video about my mother tongue from a linguistic perspective particularly. It’s also cool that you included Russian subtitles throughout the video even though there were some minor mistakes it is still great! I’ve been living in Kazakhstan and it would be nice if you made a video about Kazakh language since it’s quite interesting in terms of phonology and how suffixes are used. Thank you for your work! If you ever need help with Russian, it would be pleasure for me to help :)

For most Russians it's actually hard to de-palatalize their consonants in front of _front vowels._ When a Russian starts learning a foreign language, they are taught not to palatalize. But I can hear native speakers of non-Russian languages palatalize (soften) sometimes. The French often say _tu_ and _petit_ with _t_ palatilized, which I was forbidden to do at school. Even Arabs can say _qahwati_ (my coffee) with a "soft" t - at least I can hear it on Duolingo. And I know what I say cuz I am native in two languages: Russian and another language that does not palatalize. I can easily switch between palatalized and non-palatalized versions of _t_ (and any other consonant) and I can clearly hear the distinction. With some linguistic training, I can distinguish various degrees of palatalization between a "hard" _t_ and all the way to the infamous Hungarian _ty._ And yes, palatalization is phonemic, i.e. there are words that can only be distinguished by this feature alone: сыр / сир, тук / тюк, лук / люк, мол / моль, ролл / роль, Кола / Коля etc. If you speak without palatalizatin at all, you will still be understood cuz Russian is quite redundant in features that help understanding.

I’ve already been learning Russian for over a year and somehow you made me feel daunted by this language again.

3:12 This rule applies only when г (g) is before к (k). It happens only in two roots: мягк (soft) and лёгк (light, not heavy, easy). Voiced consonants get devoiced before unvoiced ones, so plosives become fricatives to avoid gemination of a plosive

dude...it took me over five years to learn what you cover in this 30 minute video :| And I think you forget the conditional verbs like, 'I would like to go', or, "if bob comes on time I could want to take a walk".

19:31 I am not a native speaker but I have seen this meme format before: «нельзя просто так взять и поставить в одно видео все глаголы в русском языке» Russian is hard)) Take that with a grain of соль because я не русский. Great video! I can’t wait to see what other languages you cover in the future! Have you heard of interslavic (Medžuslovjansky)? It’s worth looking into since you have studied both Polish and Russian. There’s even a discord server with Slavs from all over

I learnt Russian, and it's a great language. The case system is hard, but it allows a lot of expression, I love it.

18:01 There's no such word as попомнить, it's запомнить.

Respect for all the effort. Amazing.

13:38 себой? A typo probably but the transcription is also wrong. Собой it is.

Just passed my A1 TORFL recently and you have explained the grammar part so well.

Wow, looks like a lot of people got this recommended to them recently Yeah, I agree with the others that your palatalized t and d sound too much like ch and dzh. I had to re-teach myself Russian in my teen years, and it's an absolutely insane language. I'll never fully master it because the damn stress jumps around everywhere.

Your accent is so cute :)). It's like the most stereotypical "western" accent a Russian could ever imagine. But anyways, thanks for the video! Я вижу, что ты хорошо постарался)

Excellent video. This is how people should teach/learn languages! Just give me the information, without bullshit, without overcomplicating it, and without treating me like a child. Subscribed 😊

And I thought I knew my Russian as a semi-native speaker lol

If you think this is hard, you should try serbo-croatian! And multiple standards are the easy part. 3 genders, 7 cases, 14 tenses, 2 alphabets, pitch accent, short and long adjectives, 3 main dialect groups, 3 "ways" of speaking inside one of them... Yeah, quite complicated

so i guess the controversy about the phonemicity of ы has been decided on

I like how this guy's memes are in the target language

comments on this video are mean asf 💀💀💀 i get the uploader made some mistakes (like with the palatalized t) but cmon yall it aint a big deal

Such a huge amount of work has been done that I do not want to make comments about inaccuracies at all. On the contrary, I would like to support and express my admiration for how far you have progressed in learning the Russian language. On the other hand, linguistics is a science, and science requires avoiding any distortion. You should have announced from the very beginning of the video that the remarks of native Russian speakers are welcome. No one wants to look like an unfriendly bore.

When people are moving from A1 to C2, i am going backwards from C2, due to not speaking the language for two years already

The way you pronounce words sounds like there's a Ь every two letter XD

Когда-то я найду иностранца который сможет произносить ы и мягкие согласные…..

I can't believe that a non native Russian speaker managed to dive in that deep into the language my hat off to you sir. 👍

Actually you cannot just drop the pronoun whenever you like. Despite the meaning being kept the same thanks to conjungation, it sounds very disturbing at times. As a native speaker I would say that without sounding weird you can only drop a pronoun in a context of responding to a phrase that has mentioned the subject of your sentence. So, "Он изучает международные отношения в университете." shoud always remain with "он" written and spoken, unless you are having a dialog, like: - А что Джон делает в Москве? ("And what is John doing in Moscow?") - Изучает международные отношения в университете. ("He's studying international relations in university", with the pronoun dropped due to having John referred in a question above) The only other circumstance that comes to my mind that permits you to drop a pronoun is propositions/questions (dropping 2nd person pronouns): - Хочешь чаю? (Do you want some tea?) or - Не хотите ли нам рассказать, что это такое было? (Don't you(pluriel/polite) want to tell us, what was it right there?) although in the formal speech it is better to stick to the pronoun. Overall dropping a pronoun implies either some informality or even a dominance from a speeker towards the listener, when you drop a first person pronoun. It seems to me like by dropping your pronoun you suppose that everybody who listens to you in that moment should have been waiting for you to tell your opinion/wish/demand. Children often drop their pronoun when asking for something, as they automatically expect their parents to listen to them, they feel in a position to make a demand. But my point overall is that you better not drop pronouns. It is almost never worse with them, while may sound silly when they are missing. I hope what I've just emited was somewhat helpful or at least interesting to read. Anyway this is a minor thing and the effort you put into making this video can only make me blame youtube for not recommending it for entire two years. Amazing job, theoretical part is made very clean, браво!

You did a lot of research. Снимаю шляпу

The prononsiation is generally good but you pronounce ть as ч which isn't much but sometimes it makes understanding difficult. For better ы try moving the back of your tongue down. Great video.

7:35 just like in German some suffixes are exclusively neuter or feminine, russian “ость” is always feminine, as far as I saw

K now serious tho. A few remarks. I'm not that deep into linguistics but I'm pretty interested in it(also a Russian native) 6:48 yeah they have to go before the nouns. Have to, not must. You can say Я съел яблоко зелёное and everyone will understand u, although it gives some weird poetic vibe(I guess word order doing its weird thing again) 6:50 it usually goes in that order but again кота сыр, I can't give you examples off of my mind rn, but regularly twist them around in my colloquial speech. My guess is that's just me playing and stressing different things in the sentence 8:40 there's also a dying vocative(звательный) case, like Бог(god) -> Боже(talking to God). This is only example which is used very often in colloquial speech, mostly used in this sense: -*somebody posts some nsfw stuff* -jfc There's also друг->друже but it's very specific and rarely used 11:56 lmao but the comma in я, сейчас is wrong 12:53 for genetive third person plural there's also ихний, which is widely considered a "stupid" mistake by ex Soviet Russian teachers, but that's just soviets doing what they like raping the language and doing this prescriptivistic b*yt please don't delete my comment*s. It's often used in rural areas, perfectly fine perfectly present but you might've gotten a lot of hate if you added it. The funny thing is that их derived from ихний but these disabled kids just say that this word does not exist kek(surprise surprise ppl use it and it exists). It's a very deep rabbit hole and I don't suggest u to go there. There is a bunch of this "the word нету does not exist", sarcasticly used in this gimmick "нету слова нету". It's actually weird how Russian is the only language I know who has a ridiculous amount prescriptivistic grammarna-zi stuff, which is actually very widespread. Soviet heritage I guess. 18:20 yoooo u started to nail ы sound from this point, I'm actually amazed 18:42 although very stupid and weird but атаковатьпоатаковать can actually happen in colloquial speech, don't ask me why. Russian grammar feels like a random number generator for me sometimes 22:50 едь/езжай or иди if you're on a crosswalk, oh you explained it 24:05 I'm not sure on how it works linguistically, so I'll just convey what I've been taught in school. The whole idea is right but the "a" instead of "но" is a mistake. The "a" should be used when there's OPPOSITION present, in all other cases "но" should be used(which is usually replaceable by "и"). So your example should be небо голубое, но облака белые. Again I don't really feel the difference with my native mindest it's just "a" should be used to oppose one to another. A crappy explanation but hey I'm trying to do my best 24:39 "примерные предложения" means "approximate sentences" which is eh? It should be "примеры предложений" The video and the work you've done is insane, clapping my hands dude! There are a small mistakes here and there but the main points are right and correct. Damn I haven't written such long comment in a while. One more remark about the way you make ur vids. PLEASE speak slower it's not like I don't understand what you're saying it's just the information is so densely packed and you just spew out the words so fast it's making my brain wish to blow up and I'm native to this language. Sry for broken English, English is not my native language blah blah I don't think you care, I just feel I need to say it cuz I definitely messed up things somewhere like you did which is fine, that's how you learn stuff after all

Чел палатализованные согласные произносит будто он поляк

Locative is not the same as Prepositional. Consider the phrase "в этом году".

headache? how did you know?

"ть" is not "ch" !!! it´s just a soft "t" like in "team".

While the video is pretty good (I'm a new subscriber after watching some of the other videos as well), I just wanted to mention that the "Panslavic" flag at the start of the video when you mention proto-Slavic includes the kolovrat, which is a symbol used by modern far-right groups and neo-Nazis. Generally Panslavism is simply shown with the tricolour of blue, red and white stripes.

In case you ever want to edit this (why would you?), номери (@14:02) is not a word. The word for grammatical numbers is числа. And the plural of номер is номера. Sorry to nitpick.

LETS GOO

Nouns don't change case endings only by gender and number. First of all, you must recognize the declension of the word. First declension: masculine and feminine nouns with -а or -я ending; second declension: masculine nouns with no ending and neuter nouns with -о or -е ending; third declension: feminine nouns with -ь ending and neuter nouns with -мя ending. Female names with no ending remain the same in all cases. There's no sound /jɨ/ in Russian. It can be found only in another-language toponyms (Estonian, Turkic languages). All consonants in Russian language can be palatalized (if they aren't already palatalized). Also your palatalization is quite wrong.

"11 with allophones" damn you didn't heard about [æ, ɵ, ʉ (also lowered counterpart), ʌ, etc.]. russian wikipedia covers all of them also you killed with pronouncing [tʲ, dʲ] as [c, ɟ] 4:29 ахахахаахахахахахахахсах "алфабит" ("алфавит" more correctly)

18:03 don't know where you got попомнить from, I'm not even sure it exists in modern spoken Russian

13:38 It's собой, not себой. That's not a word 26:37 Ah! Adjectives don't follow their respective nouns' weird case when used with 2, 3 and 4 numbers, but only if the noun isn't feminine. Три грамматических рода, but Две большие жопы. Same with adjectives that became nouns, as in Три мороженых, две двойные сплошные (two parallel lines between road lanes). Although it seems you can use both accusative-nominative and accusative-genitive case adjectives with 2, 3, 4 without changing the feminine noun. Я съел две мясных котлеты/Я съел две мясные котлеты. But in inanimate nominative you would usually use -ые/-ие in those cases, e.g. "Точку A пересекают две прямые линии". Weirdly, animate nominative nouns can be used with both -ые/-ие and -ых/-их adjectives. Три высокопоставленных (высокопоставленные) чиновницы купили дом на Лазурном берегу. Using -ые/-ие is more like telling a story, providing a context, while -ых/-их refers to it, but that's just my guess.

13:38 собой, not себой

if u'r learning Russian to speak with natives, u can complitely ignore cases, everyone will understand u anyway better make the effort to grow ur vocab, because u'll learn cases later due speaking practice

You pronounced щ more like ш and ш more like щ

your ть/дь sound very Polish)))

very good with the theory! but there are quite a lot of mistakes in the translation=(( (I´m russian)

жесть

Your pronunciation is a bit off Your Ы is a bit off. Idk how to spell it but it sounds more like the sound you're making plus и at the same time. Your Ть Sounds like Ч When you say любить it sounds like любич Ть sounds like Т but your pushing air out when you say it

Subtitles are mostly incorrect, but only a bit

My ears are bleeding after hearing all your instances of -ть

There are only five phonemic vowels in Russian. И always follows palatalized consonants, and ы always follows non-palatalized consonants, so if you're assuming that palatalization is phonemic, these two can be seen as allophones of each other. There are people who disagree with this, but that's the most widely agreed upon analysis.

Nice video, shame about the ы.

I am still waiting for Ukrainian….