Posted on 11/02/2019 3:40:22 PM PDT by VRW Conspirator
Just watch Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. You will have a realistic Russian accent down in no time.
I have a Czech acquaintance who grew up under Communism - it annoys him to no end when people assume from his accent that he’s Russian.
Rules for achieving a mediocre or better Christopher Walken impression:
1: Let’s begin with the difficult one: the New York accent.
2: Always pronounce one syllable words using two syllables
3: You have to pause... occasionally... within sentences. But not too often or it becomes repetitive.
4: You have to draw out the final word of a sentence occasionally. But not too often or it becomes repetitive.
5: You have to crack your voice occasionally. What do I mean by that? Hard to explain without demonstrating. But again, not too often or it becomes repetitive.
6: Sound a little bit crazy. Do this often.
Also Russian doesn’t have the verb to be in the present tense. So you can drop an ‘am, is or are’ every now and then. “I very important man” “She very pretty voman”
“Moose and squirrel, moose and squirrel, meester beeg”.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHA!
Are youse crazy or what?
Russian accent eez sexy. But Russian men always seem dour and depressed.
(Sometimes that’s sexy, too.)
Exactly! I took Russian when I was deployed to Uzbekistan and at first talked like Boris Badenov (”Look, Natasha! Is moose and squirrel!”)
But I discovered that speaking close to the front & roof of the mouth, almost nasally, made for a more authentic sound. The rolled R is more subtle in Russian than Spanish, this is true.
The greatest initial hurdle is to learn Cyrillic and to hear it the same way as with the Latin alphabet. When the sound of a printed Cyrillic word comes to mind, then it is no longer an impenetrable code. And it’s much easier to learn if you think of it as modified Greek, which it is.
Basic Russian phrases & sentences are learned much faster when you don’t have to transliterate.
What?
By the way, maybe you’ll notice I pronounced that with two syllables.
I’m a native-born (Anglo) American, but I have a degree in Russian. Mostly because of that, I already have a really good Russian accent when speaking English, should I so desire. I’ve also been mistaken as a native Russian speaker by native Russians—because I’ve been continuously (every day) perfecting my Russian accent (when speaking Russian) since I began learning the language in 1971 (age 14.)
Russian does not have the word “the,” nor the word “a.” So don’t use use either of those words when attempting to sound like a Russian when speaking English.
Also, when using the present tense, they almost never use any form of the verb “to be” (they do have the words, they just rarely use them.) So, instead of “I am ready,” they will say, “I ready.” (Not that all of them will make such mistakes when speaking English, some of them can be VERY hard to distinguish from native speakers of English.)
When I worked in NYC years ago I noticed very quickly New Yorkers tended to say that a lot. Putting ‘’what’’ at the end of a question. Instead of asking, “What are you, crazy?’’. They’d say “Are youse crazy or what?’’.
I met a guy that came over from Russia when he was a teen. He had NO Russian accent - it was hard to believe. I asked him how he learned to speak English so well.
“I watched a lot of cartoons when I first came over.”
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Your Czech friend no doubt was required to take Russian in school while walking past Red Army tanks on pedestals.
My Polish priest speaks English as a third language. I get an askance look when I speak Russian to him; their enmity goes back centuries.
Exactly what I was going to say...Rocky and Bullwinkle, language teachers. Or at least accent coaches...
Yeah, so the New York accent and inflections are the hard part. All I know about it I saw on TV. I’m an Oregonian my whole life.
Moose and skwirrel.
My husband’s grandmother was English, and she always pronounced ‘squirrel’ as ‘squEErel’.
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