In Episode 9, Tim talked about how his experience learning Russian as an English native speaker- what aspects of Russian were easy for him and which were hard. In this episode, Tim tells which features of English are easy and which are difficult for Russian speakers. Everything is covered: vowels, consonants, consonant clusters, word stress, intonation, the chewing gum accent; spelling, word formation, vocabulary (including phrasal verbs) and grammar.
Hey Tim! I’m curious about your opinion on Russian accent. It’s quite understandable, right? Do you think advanced students of English should strive to give up their Russian accent completely and immitate for example British one, like lots of teachers do? I mean, it’s a lot of hard work, I surely admit that, but it still sounds fake to me.
Hi Elizaveta!
I completely agree that the Russian accent is quite understandable. Out of all the Russian speakers I have taught over the years (probably near one thousand people), only one of them needed longer-term work on his pronunciation.
An important caveat is that the problems that lower level students sometimes have distinguishing vowels and which I mentioned towards the beginning of this episode needs typically to be worked on with a mix of practice distinguishing and actually pronouncing minimal pairs, which in effect is work on accent.
I think advanced students should strive to work on their accent only if they really want to, although I personally don’t see a compelling reason to do so.
I agree that many Russian teachers’ attempts to make themselves sound British usually just makes them sound like they’re trying hard- almost certainly the models of British speech that they are trying to copy are deficient.