Thread: Pronunciation question..

With o, is there a way to know when it should be stressed or unstressed?

I recommend reading: http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/rus ... nounc.html

The part on The Akanie and Ikania Rules gives some comments, but you need to learn which syllable is stressed to know if the 'o' is stressed. Ive noticed that generally if a word ends in 'o' though its unstressed.

PS: Im of the understanding if you stress the 'o' when it should be unstressed (eg: say spacebo instead of spaceba) then you end up sounding Ukranian instead of Russian.

Corrections on my understanding from the more advanced members?

Unstressed "O" is pronounced like the second "a" in the name Anna. It is hard at first to learn which syllable is the stressed one but here is one rule for you. If the word contains a "yo" the stress is always on the "yo".

"generally if the word ends in "o" it's unstressed".

Not always the case, as the example of the Russian word for letter "peesmo". Here the stress is on the "o". I found that the best way for me to learn the stress was simply memorization. I had to actually take each word with more than one syllable and memorize each one. That worked for me.

Good luck with your Russian learning!

Originally Posted by Svetlana

"generally if the word ends in "o" it's unstressed".

Here's a bunch of counterexamples that I could think of in about 3 minutes:

хорошо
село
домино
гумно
перо
ядро
толокно
пшено

Yes, there are lots of examples of this but don't confuse the poor person on the other computer! That's why I only gave just one example of this. "mnye teplo" is another example but still. This particular forum is for helping beginners...let's not be confusing.

ive read a lot about the rules of "o" in russian and i still dont understand it. the only thing i do is "if its the accented sylable it sounds like o, if it comes after the accented sylable it sounds like ah, anywhere else like uh" but is that right, i mean, many sites say different things about how the characters should be prnounced

If it is accented, it's "oh", if it is not, it's "uh."