Russian Pronunciation Course for Beginners released

I am very happy to announce the release of Russian Pronunciation course for beginners – a software that will help you learn the correct pronunciation of Russian words. It's a video course that contains 3,517 video clips of 3,080 Russian words read by a native speaker. The words were carefully chosen, for example:

  • only the most frequent Russian words were used for the course,
  • the course contains lots of examples of each sound of the Russian language,
  • a special attention was brought to consonant clusters and double consonants – the pronunciation of such words can be difficult to master.

In order to use the course, you will need a special software that is called Pronunciation Player. This player is written in Java. One of the reasons why I chose Java is to make it runnable on different computer systems. My knowledge of Java is limited, so I had to hire a developer to write the code. By the way, thank you, Narayan! We spent a lot of time discussing the player, to make it nice and intuitively easy to use. You can find the online tutorial for Pronunciation Player here.

The course is not free. The main reason is that it took me an enormous amount of time to create it – I started as early as January 2014. Choosing words, recording and editing videos, synchronizing and translating the subtitles in English and French – all that was very time-consuming. I also had to invest in the recording equipment, pay the developer, etc. But still I think the language courses should not cost several hundreds of dollars, so I decided to sell it for 34.95 Canadian dollars (since I live in Canada), which is approximately 27 US dollars.

If you are interested, I invite you to test the free demo version of the course that is fully functional, but contains only 139 video clips. In order to watch the course, you will need to have an account on EasyPronunciation.com and download Pronunciation Player here. Please note that you will also need an active Internet connection each time when you start the program.

I am very serious about the project – I have plans to further improve Pronunciation Player and release pronunciation courses for other languages (the next candidate is French). So if you experience any problems while using Pronunciation Player or purchasing the course, please feel free to contact me. I will do my best to solve your problem, although it may take additional time if I need to contact my developer who is often very busy.

Tags: Russian, Russian pronunciation, Russian phonetics, pronunciation course, software