English pronunciation for Russian speakers
- Free diagnostic
- No card
- 6 transfer points
The specific sounds to check
th has no native equivalent
Russian has neither English th sound; speakers substitute s/z, t/d, or occasionally f/v depending on the specific word and their exposure to English spelling.
No native w
Russian has no w sound; it's replaced with v, so "wine" can come out as "vine".
Final-consonant devoicing
Like German, Russian devoices word-final consonants as a regular rule, so a voiced English ending can be heard as its voiceless twin — "bed" can sound like "bet", "rise" like "rice".
No native h
Russian has no h sound comparable to English's breathy h; it's usually replaced with a harder, more guttural sound (closer to the Russian х), which can make English h-words sound consistently stronger than intended.
Palatalized consonants transfer
Russian distinguishes plain from "soft" (palatalized) consonants as separate sounds, a habit that can add an unwanted y-like colour to English consonants before certain vowels.
Vowel reduction follows a different pattern
Russian reduces unstressed vowels too, but toward different target sounds and in a different pattern than English's schwa, so the two languages' reduction habits can clash rather than reinforce each other.
What a week looks like
Day 1-2
Drill both th sounds in isolation, then inside short sentences.
Day 3-4
Practise wine/vine, keeping w lips-only with no teeth involved.
Day 5-6
Drill bad/bed and rice/rise, holding the voicing buzz through to the end of the word.
Day 7
Re-read the diagnostic line and compare it against your Day 1 take.
Not every point above will be yours
These are common, well-documented transfer patterns for Russian speakers as a group — not a rule about any one person. Region, schooling and how long someone has spoken English all change which of these actually apply. The diagnostic line is there to tell you which ones are really yours, not the list above on its own.Straight answers
Why is final-consonant devoicing so common across different languages?
It's a genuine, independent rule in several languages, including German and Russian — it isn't a shared mistake, it's a real feature of how those languages are pronounced, applied out of habit to English, which doesn't have the same rule.
Does Russian's h substitute change meaning?
It can make h-words sound unusually forceful rather than change which word is heard, so it's a lower priority than th or w — fix those first.