ночью (“in the night”) | Russian Pronunciation Demystified!

0:00Hi guys, I'm Kiera and today I'll learn how to pronounce the words MUCH and MUCH you, meaning night or in the night. Let's start with MUCH. Let's say the first two letters with good Russian default mouth position, just lightly forward, tip of the tongue behind the bottom teeth, lips rounded and protruded. MU, MU, in English the letter O closes to an O sound. O, O, but a stressed Russian O does the opposite. It opens either from an O to an O sound or from an O to an O sound. O, O, O. Let's do it again. DRU THANK LEAPS MU, MU, MU. Now we're ready for the CHE. CHE is always soft and the tongue is high and forward inside the mouth when we say it. Let's do it. DRU THANK LEAPS, CHE, CHE, not CHE with a low tongue but CHE with a high tongue.

1:08Once you have a good O and a good soft CHE, there's something magical and subtle that happens when you put them together. Because the tongue has to move so dramatically from the O position to the CHE position, we can actually hear it happen in the O vowel towards the end. NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH. When you first notice this, it's tempting to overdo it. Think back to when you first learned this word. Sometimes we could hear this phenomenon happen and we would say NOICH in an attempt to reproduce it. The thing to do here is to allow the change in vowel quality to happen rather than to force it. Or in other words, not to overemphasize the change and to let it happen as late as possible. Let's do the whole thing. DRU THANK LEAPS, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH, NOICH,

2:25NOOICHU is similar, but there's one more secret to know here. The soft sign means that the YYES sound at the beginning of the letter U is very strong. We do this by placing our tongue very high and pushing lots of air through to make a buzzing sound. YYYU, U. Now all we have to do is put it all together. du t'ang yips, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you. Practice it slowly for weeks, and when you deploy it in speech, give yourself a second to prepare. With time, this word will become easy, but you must slow it down and be precise in order to master it. Let's do it. du t'ang yips, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you, nohich, you.

3:39That's it guys. Be sure to find me on YouTube and learn Russian with Kira and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'd love to hear from listeners, so please suggest a word for an episode, or just say hi in the comments. You can also support my work on Patreon at LearnRussianWithKira, and you can check out my video course at UnlockingRussianPrenunciation.org, where I explain why some letters sound different in certain situations and how you can learn to predict and pronounce all of the subtleties. And if you teach Russian and you like my videos, please consider recommending LearnRussianWithKira on YouTube to your students, so they can see them too. See you later.