Pronouncing and Conjugating есть

There are actually only four truly irregular verbs in Russian! This video covers one of them: есть, meaning "to eat." We'll go over a few forms that just need to be memorized, and then a pronunciation tip that doesn't get a lot of attention.

You may know that unstressed vowels can be reduced in Russian... and even stressed vowels can sound different, depending on what kind of sounds come immediately before and after.

It may sound complicated, but it's really just a matter of what's easier to pronounce in the flow of natural speech. To see why that is, we'll look at images of the tongue, created with Flash MRI technology developed by physicist Jens Frahm of the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie.

To see how the tongue moves in real time to create speech, be sure to watch this fascinating video at the Max Planck Society channel:    • Echtzeit-MRT-Film: Sprechen  

For a discussion (in Russian) on [e] and [ɛ], watch this video at the Antipode Polyglot channel:    • Как построить диаграмму гласных в Praat / ...