We reduce vowels (because we can)

You know what makes Russian language difficult? Nope. Not cyrillic letters. In fact, most of them are already familiar to you. You have to memorize some of them, but believe me, it's a matter of practice. We Russians never struggle with Latin characters, so you can read cyrillic ones as easy as we read Latin. They may be pronounced in a different way, like the Russian B which gives you the [V] sound, but anyway, Russian words are much more user friendly than the English ones. Normally if we see a word, we can pronounce it without a mistake. Well, the only mistake we natives can make is a stress mistake due to unpredictable stress on words. But it's not the point.

The problem is that we have vowel reduction. And not only us, but also Portuguese speaking people. Sometimes people confuse our languages and say that they sound similar. Yep. That happens because of the vowel reduction.

Check the video out if you don't remember how Portuguese sounds. (Sounds amazing!)

And yes, it sounds really similar to Russian, hovever, they belong to different language families and are not mutually understandable.

But why do they sound familiar? Because of the phenomenon of vowel reduction, which simply describes the way in which unstressed vowels are pronounced with less phonetic clarity than stressed vowels. Fortunately, the reduction is entirely predictable once you know where the stress falls in a word.

For example the word moloko (молоко). I know that the stress falls on the last syllable. (There is no logic behind, you should just learn how each word sounds, we don't have any rules nor diacritic marks to show that). Anyway, moloko. The third syllable is stressed, the others are reduced. Threfore I'll read this word like muh-luh-ko. (Malako para los que hablan español o italiano). The last syllable is stressed, the first and the second are reduced.

So if your mother tongue is Spanish or Italian, this thing may seem a little bit unusual at first, but I'm sure you'll get used to it.

There are some rules which describe this phenomenon in details, but I think they're bulky and unnecessary unless you listen to the Russian language and practice it. So go on!