How do you speak with a Russian accent?

I’m neither Russian nor a linguist, but here are some things:
Exaggerate your pronounciation of Ls
Roll your Rs
“Th” is like a D
I like “it” sounds like an “e” “It”—>“Eet”

This is what I’ve noticed in the stereotypical Russian accent (and a lot of this fits my Russian relatives):

Short “a” as in “cat” is pronounced more like “eh”, so “ket” and “eccent”.
“l” gets pronounced as a velar l more often, that is, like in the word “ball” rather than in “love”
“h” is pronounced as a velar fricative “kh” like in German “Bach” or Scottish “loch”
“w”—> “v”
And don’t forget to palatalize; the Russians love their palatalization (that is, insert a “y” sound before many vowels, mostly “e”, since “e” is palatalized by default in many Russian words).

That’s a start at least ;)

Omit articles (a, an, the) and try to speak without parting your teeth.

Watch, “Armageddon” the film over and over.

Here’s a snippet

Of what who you’ll be studying from. Lev “All Made in Taiwan” Andropov :D

Search Youtube for “In mother russia.” I bet there are a ton of things.

Draw your tongue back and down, speak slowly, round out every vowel sound, and be a little nasal.

I’m waiting for the Russian jellies to speak up. I know we’ve got some…

@fundevogel, I’m surprised. Wouldn’t they be the last ones to know? If, say, a Russian speaker asked me how to speak Russian with an American accent, I would have no idea what to say. I don’t know how the characteristics of my speech sound to a native speaker of another language when I try to use that person’s language. I just know that my speech gives me away instantly, even when I think I’m doing pretty well.

Um afrad uh dunt know vot choo min.

Listen to the Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff here

Watch the original versions of Star Trek and immitate Chekov.

@gailcalled Thanks for the Yakov link. A pretty funny trip down memory lane….
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@Jeruba It’s because I took a few semesters of Russian in school and can point out several sounds that gave me difficulty, sometimes saying them at all and sometimes accidentally switching them. It took me ages for my mouth to learn a half decent Ы and can’t hear let alone pronounce the difference between Ш and Щ. Plus in Russian letters change a bit depending on if they’re voiced, unvoiced, soft or hard. Sometimes Г sounds like a Russian В, but other times it sounds like К. The rest of the time it has the decency to sound like a Г. Х can be tricky too. Even though I technically know the difference between Е, Ё and И I screw them up plenty too and I imagine I’m not the only one.

I guarantee you there are a million English speakers that say И when they ought to say Ы.

I can’t explain how it sounds when I butcher Russian pronunciation, but I definitely know a lot of my trouble spots. I expect this is the case with a lot of foreign language learners.

@fundevogel I’ve had a couple of semesters of Russian, too. Does the Toys ”Я” Us logo drive you as crazy as it drives me? ;)

I find if weird how Russian letters sound different but have the same characters.
Like this

@glacial Ha, not enough of them around here for me to think about it much. I do tend to be unnecessarily irritated when I see fonts that try to render English words as if they were written in cyrillic. I don’t care that you can sorta make a capital A look like Д. It just makes me wonder who the idiot was that thought he could replace a vowel with a consonant. Same for rendering N as И.

@fundevogel I know, right? And that B is a V, people! Hahaha.

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