When О Sounds like А in Russian Language 

Wonder what am I gonna become when I stop being stressed

I've subscribed to several "Learn Russian" channels, but I have to say, Fydor breaks it down in an understandable and useful manner!

You did, as usual, a great, interesting and useful video Fedor, but I think you may generate some confusion by calling pairs such as б/п 'strong' and 'soft', because the adjective 'soft' is already used for contrasts of the б/бь type; the correct names are, as I'm sure you know already 'voiced' and 'unvoiced' (звонкий/глухой).

After a long conversation... MY MOUTH WILL HURT! Hahahaha love it

7:56 well that's why the letter Й is called short I in Russian. Similar happens in English when you say Yes and boY those two Y don't make the same sound.

Oh my god this is so confusing! You explain it in a way that makes my head not hurt, though so major props to you! I took a bunch of Spanish in high school and college and it was sooo much easier than Russian!!! I really wish I had the option to take Russian then because now I'm having such a difficult time teaching myself. I'm so glad I found your videos, though! They help soooo much more than you know! Thank you so much for all of your hard work, Fedor! I really appreciate it a lot! I don't know how you're able to keep up with the channel and school and sports and everything but you're doing a really freaking awesome job!

This was a REALLY helpful video concerning the pronunciation nuance of красивый. Спасибо. I only wish that I had seen this 36 years ago when I was studying Russian. Fedor, do you have a short list of Russian film or TV show suggestions from RU-vid? Playing films at 75% (or lower if necessary) or so speed seems to be the next best thing to being in a Russian-speaking environment. Also, would you suggest watching them with the Russian subtitles or without? (Sometimes they are incorrect and lag a little). Спасибо опять за помощь, Федор. Brian.

these "minute details" videos are awesome because I was pronouncing it wrong in my head reading it at home

Extremely helpful! Seriously. I really appreciate you analyzing things from a learner's perspective.

I was waiting for the pair Я - И, it seems to me that unstressed Я usually becomes И, or something like that. :)

1:17 when i try to read my own notes because my handwriting is awful.

Thanks for a very good explanation of something that had been puzzling me. Great job!

Thank you sir for all your hard work into your videos. One day maybe I can afford to attend your camp. I have improved my pronunciation of the little words that I know, thanks to your guidance. 🎉

Excellent video explains a lot of my questions with the different sounding letters

Great thanks. Helpful to hear these rules explained as well as having read about them.

This was really insightful information regarding the changes in pronunciations for consonants. It helped me understand why Бог is pronounced bok instead of bog and even more on how to say нового. Today has been a great day :)

great channel!! the videos are v useful!!! 👍🏻👍🏻

Apologies to all of the English language learners for our spelling. I really appreciate the Russian "true phonetic" spelling, even though there are some minor exceptions (-ово, -его). Is it possible that "-его" used to be pronounced as "-yeGo" in old Russian? English uses "old traditional" spelling rather than phonetic. It used to be a much more germanic sounding language before the French influence in the 11th century. We still keep a lot of the spellings from the old germanic way of speaking English. The "gh" in "enough" likely comes from a Northern/Scottish dialect where they use a harder "h" sound. So, ""-gh", would have been like '-x' in Russian. Today, that sound only appears in Northern England, in "Gaelic English". Also, take the word for 2, "two", for example. It used be pronounced as-spelled, as is the case in Swedish. But now we pronounce it more like the French "deux" ("ду/ту"). We haven't actually pronounce 2 like "two" in 1000 years, but we keep the old spelling. ...tradition, for better or for worse.

this one was really helpful..thks..

Here it must be said that in different regions of Russia the pronunciation is different (Russia is a huge country :) For example, in the northern regions, especially in rural areas, the word собака (dog) is pronounced as it is written, that is, sObaka. This form is considered obsolete, but they say so.

Молодец! Хорошая работа!

Do you mean «ударения» by “stressed” ??

There are some cases that you didn't mention: in some 3-consonant combinations, the middle one isn't pronounced; ТС is pronounced Ц; sometimes, Е doesn't soften the previous consonant. There's also a rule that I find a bit weird: Ь followed by a vowel has /j/ even if it's О (компаньон, шампиньон) There are also some shifts that only happen in specific words: in берет (as the alternative spelling of берёт, which (spelling) I hate) and черед, the second Е sounds like (and can be written as) Ё, and, according to Wikipedia, it's the other way around when unstressed, though such cases are rare (probably an example is четырёхлетний); in мадемуазель, the first Е isn't pronounced; солнце is the only word I remember rn where Л isn't; there are also other cases.

I'm a native English speaker, and I sometimes purposefully speak broken English. When a non-native English speaker is around me when I do that, I always feel bad for them

"Listen to a native speaker since they speak perfectly." That wouldn't apply here in the USA! Boston, NYC, Kentucky, Texas all have their own "sound."😆 For whatever reason, YT recommended this video (maybe my phone heard the English version of "Russia Today" in the background🤔) But I have to say that I like your explanation of the sounds and I'm going to watch more of your videos. Maybe I'll learn something.👍

Awesome video-- some of the first things I learned about Russian phonology.

Fascinating!

Which video of yours should I start with? I know letters and how to pronounce but I don't know the words and grammar.

1:34: Voiced/unvoiced.

My Russian teacher who is from Russia said that if Г is between two consonants, it is always read as B

The O-> A sound happens in English too... people seem to neglect that bc it happens all the time. It's just unstressed. The most common example is "Stop"

Спасибо за урок😄

Russian pronunciation and “sounding out” words is ridiculously easier than English once you understand the rules. Thanks for the bid!

Thanks.

I also noted that whenever a word (not names, like mine, "Соня") ends with "ся", the "Я" does not have the typical sound of "YA" but only is pronounced as "A" - by you (and some others) - could you speak about that please? Thank you. I like your lessons very, very much! Clear and to the point. Super! Also, when you make a new video, could you please leave the written sentence on the screen longer - it flashes away so fast, that even when I stop the video, the writing is already gone. Thank you again. (I always write down everything you say, especially, every word and all sentences in Russian. We need both spoken and written language to learn faster, and to review the next day).

This really confused me, спасибо за помощь.

1:19 when i see the exam paper🤣🤣

Какого is another good example of the a/o change that had made me wonder about this so thanks Fedor. Now I understand that because the last syllable is stressed that changes the o but also the г, right? Or is it stressed on the 2nd syllable?

Your videos are really helpful. I only recently found that the word for "little" in Russian is немного, but I still cannot understand why the ending oгo is not pronounced as OBO, but kept as oгo with no sound change- it would be very helpful if you could explain the reason behind it. I am quite advanced in Russian, it's just some word like this that catches me out with the pronunciation as I just assumed that every the г-B sound change occurs for all word with the eгo/oгo ending.

Do you have a video on the pronunciation of ы, I usually pronounce it like uyi, like the u in under, and try to make a y sound as I’m saying the u, I don’t know if it’s correct though.

I'm from Brazil and this help me a lot

that's strange, cause i always heard voiced sounds as the softer ones, and unvoiced as the harsh ones. weird

You had me at English is much worse! Welcome to Germäny, where Ärbersafde turns into Breschdlingsgsellz just by crossing a River. 🤣

i'm attempting to learn russian and these videos help a lot, but i want to know, if you do pronounce russian words like собака and спасисо, so i should change the pronunciation of the O to A - but if i don't do that, is that unacceptable pronunciation? or just advisory? on more complex words if i ever forget to change those letters in my head, would people still understand exactly what i mean?

are you talking about the soft and hard consonants in Russian? hard consonants become soft when it's the ending of a word or when it's before a soft consonant unless it's always hard like ц,ж,ш, and the soft consonants that are always soft are ч and щ. This does happen when a soft is before a hard unless it's С in Своей (note: this isn't the only word that does this but there are many exceptions in Russian)

Hey, what about the pronunciation of the ending -ая? It doesn't really sound like "aya" to me, it sounds more like an extended "a" or even a very short "e". Could you clarify that? Спасибо!

Ого!

I was told that unstressed "O" is still "O" in Siberian dialects.

Привет Федор, спасибо большое! You make great videos which are really helpful. Would you please help me with something, though? I do not understand the difference between даёт и дарит, which do I use and when. For example: "Учитель даёт словарь ученику." and "Он дарит цветы своей жене." What is the difference in the usage of these words, and why wouldn't both examples (or more like them) use either just даёт или дарит? I love Russian (I'm just a beginner) and I love the culture. I would really appreciate any input. Пока Пока!

5:11 I've been saying it wrong this entire time -

I think calling the consonants voiced/unvoiced is better than hard/soft.

So to get this right... ничего is pronounced nichevo?

Thank you Fedor for this explanation. Мне больше помочь

At 2ː51, when you said "hard," the h sounded like the x (the voiceless velar fricative en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative), because I don't think Russian has an English h sound .(But, my language helper is from eastern Ukraine and says x words like хлеб as "hlʲep" instead of "xlʲep". I think this is a Ukrainian dialect thing because of the influence of the "h" in Ukrainain, perhaps)... One blogger explains, "There was never a h-sound in the proper Russian, but the influence of the Ukrainian church tradition in the 17th century brought the fashion to pronounce the letter "г" in the church texts as the Ukrainian "h", so that in the following couple of centuries the letter "г" could stand for both sounds and, in particular, used for foreign "h" as well as "g". With time, this double pronunciation disappeared, now preserved only in the pronunciation of the word "бог" as "бох", and this change of every "г" back to "g" affected the borrowings. Since the pattern was already established, new words kept being borrowed with "g", e. g. Гитлер, Гиммлер, even Гюго, where "h" is purely orthographical. However, since some moment in the 20th century, a tendency to use "х" in newer borrowings started to emerge, so that now we have "х" as a default, while keeping "г" in almost all the words borrowed in the past." forum.wordreference.com/threads/h-russian-%D1%85-or-%D0%B3.2785128/ All this is so interestingǃ

I started learning Russian today, after learning the alphabets, and this O A thing was so confusing

Pls Pls Pls answer me I think you pronounce the letter "t" at the end of the sentences as a "ch" sound. Am I right?

True English is weird, Pacific: C can be pronounces as S & K

Г is another confuser. Thanks for trying... hehee

00:45 No, it's not this way. It's rather that the English language came first, and only then people tried to figure out how to write it down, first with runes, then with the Latin alphabet. And since they couldn't reproduce their sounds accurately with the Latin alphabet, they had to improvise with all sorts of different ways to write it down with existing letters that sounded similarly to them in Latin. Not to count that there occurred some sound changes as the language evolved as well, while the notation stayed the same and didn't follow to reflect them. 01:33 More like voiced and unvoiced :q It's the same setup in the mouth, and the only difference is whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not, which you can verify by putting your fingers on your trachea and checking if you can feel the vibrations or not. 05:30 This still doesn't explain WHY does this change of sound occurs. It's just a mindless search-and-replace rule :/ And I'm pretty sure it's not something that is dictated by how the mouth prefers to pronounce it, because in Polish it's still pronounced as "jego", not "jewo". So it seems that this rule might really be just arbitrary. 06:47 And what if different native speakers pronounce the same words differently? :q Which pronunciation should I adapt to then? :P E.g. some people pronounce "д" as "d", while others as "dz".

Его , пишется , но произноситься ево . У моего телефона , быстро садиться аккумулятор .

У Вас важный урок. Спасибо большое.

You said we just have to listen to native speakers in order to imitate their sounds but the problem is that I don't trust my ears 🤣

Russian thankfully doesn't have things like enough, cough, and thorough.

What if I can speak, but can't write properly? I'm half Russian and trying to learn how to write the language, but these pronunciation things make it a lot harder

I've also come to find that sometimes У sounds like А. Is that correct?

Меня , it sounds like миня , is that right？

Со́бака ударение на ооооо

But what about немнога ???

I agree English is way worse. Once I learned some other European languages with more regular pronunciation rules, I could never go back to standard Midwest American English--always confused. English pronunciation is so difficult.

😂😂😂 Fedor: English is way worse! Americans/Brits/Aussies: Yea, he has us there.... 🤷‍♂️ Height vs Eight vs Ate Ph= F sound Gh= F sound Read (present tense) Read (past tense) Red Lead (take charge) Lead (element) Poor Pour Flower Flour 🤦‍♂️

These are voiced and unvoiced consonant

Why Russians don't write as they speak. I mean, you pronounce сАбака so why don't you write сАбака? In Vietnamese, we write what we speak. Of course, there are some differences in pronouncing in different areas.

Can I marry you 👀 👅