2026년 9월 9일 · 6분 분량
The English sounds Kazakh does not have, and how to make them
Six sounds cause most of the difficulty for Kazakh speakers, and none of them are hard once you know what your mouth is supposed to do.
Pronunciation problems are not random. They are predictable from your first language, which is good news, because it means there is a short list rather than an endless one. For a Kazakh speaker learning English, six sounds cause most of the difficulty, and every one of them is a position of the tongue rather than a talent.
The th sound, in think and in this, does not exist in Kazakh or Russian, so it usually comes out as s, z, t or d. The tongue tip goes lightly between the teeth and air passes over it. It feels wrong for about a week. The two versions differ only in whether the voice is on: think is voiceless, this is voiced, and your hand on your throat will tell you which one you just made.
The short i in ship and the long ee in sheep are one sound in Kazakh, so they collapse into each other and produce sentences you did not intend. The long one is tense and the corners of the mouth pull back. The short one is relaxed and shorter, and the mistake most learners make is trying to say a different vowel rather than a shorter, looser version of the same one.
The w in water becomes a v, because Kazakh has the second and not the first. The lips round into a small circle and do not touch the teeth at all. If your top teeth touch your bottom lip, you have made a v. Practise on words where the difference changes the meaning, west and vest, wine and vine, and the mouth learns it faster than a rule does.
Final consonants get devoiced: bed becomes bet, dog becomes dock. This is the one Russian speakers share, and it is worth attention because English uses final consonants to carry meaning far more than either language does. The vowel before a voiced ending is also longer, so bed has a longer e than bet, and lengthening the vowel is often easier than voicing the consonant.
Word stress is the last one and the most important, because it is the mistake that makes otherwise correct English hard to follow. English stresses one syllable hard and swallows the rest, and a sentence with every syllable given equal weight sounds like a list. Learn the stress with the word, not afterwards, and mark it in your notes. A word learned with the wrong stress takes longer to fix than a word not learned at all.