{"id":64858,"date":"2020-01-27T06:54:13","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T11:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fluentu.com\/blog\/learn\/russian-vowels\/"},"modified":"2025-02-25T04:34:40","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T09:34:40","slug":"russian-vowels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fluentu.com\/blog\/russian\/russian-vowels\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Vowels: A Simple Pronunciation Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have heard that there are a bunch of rules when it comes to using vowels in Russian. Thankfully, these rules aren’t hard and fast<\/a>. They’re more like “guidelines” and have lots of exceptions to consider.<\/p>\n

If you’re still in the early stages of learning the alphabet<\/a>\u00a0or want to gain a better understanding of vowels as a Russian self-learner<\/a>, read on.<\/p>\n

[fluentu-toc]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Russian Vowel Pairs<\/h2>\n

You may already be aware that Russian has 33 letters<\/a> which includes 21 consonants, 10 vowels, a hard sign and a soft sign. The 10 vowels are divided into pairs: \u0410\u2014\u042f,<\/strong> \u041e\u2014\u0401<\/strong>, \u042d\u2014\u0415<\/strong>, \u0423\u2014\u042e<\/strong> and \u042b\u2014\u0418<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The first vowel in each pair represents a hard-indicating vowel, while the second letter in each pair is the soft-indicating vowel.<\/p>\n

It’s best to learn these vowels in pairs because the sounds are very similar,<\/strong> and the consonant that precedes the vowel determines which vowel is used.<\/p>\n

To better understand this, let\u2019s examine the \u0431\u0443\u043a\u0432\u044b (letters) and \u0437\u0432\u0443\u043a\u0438 (sounds) of these vowel pairs.<\/p>\n

How to Pronounce Russian Vowels<\/h3>\n

We’ve provided detailed pronunciation information for each vowel, but if you’re unsure about the pronunciation of a word,<\/strong> you can always look it up on the user-generated pronunciation dictionary Forvo<\/a> or see it used by native Russian speakers on the FluentU program<\/a>, which uses short video clips from authentic Russian media to teach the language.

FluentU<\/strong> takes authentic videos\u2014like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks\u2014and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.<\/p>\r\n

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You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app<\/a> or Android app.<\/a><\/p>\r\n

P.S. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)<\/a><\/i>\r\n<\/p>\r\n

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