I have just started an Intensivkurs of Russian. What really struck me is the ubiquitous palatalization, but what I find most difficult is wrapping my head around the sound represented by ы. To me it sounds almost like a pharyngealized [ɪ] (in words such as вы or ты), but I am not sure about how to articulate it. I have been trying the whole day and sometimes it comes out, but not in a controlled manner.
What are, then, the articulatory phonetic properties of ы?
Russian ⟨ы⟩ can be a little difficult to master, especially if one wishes for a native-like pronunciation. When stressed, the vowel in question is a close central unrounded vowel: IPA /ɨ/. But, as with all "hard vowels" in Russian, it strongly velarizes any preceding consonant, which manifests as a noticeable glide after the consonant and before ⟨ы⟩. So, ты comes out phonetically as [t̻ˠɰɨ], where ɰ is the IPA symbol for the velar approximant – a ⟨w⟩ (as in water) without rounding the lips. This gives ⟨ы⟩ a diphthong-like quality distinct from /ɨ/ in many other languages. One thing to note is that Russian speakers maintain the velar approximant before [ɨ] even when pronouncing ⟨ы⟩ in isolation (without any consonant before it to velarize), e.g., when reciting the alphabet.
To make /ɨ/, try following the instructions in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hogVBFECQ. For an English speaker, one way may be to start with something like 'woo', and get rid of the lip-rounding.
The simplest way is probably this: pronounce the [u] sound (as in ’soon’, for example) and then try to unround your lips, without changing the position of the tongue.
I have seen palatal sounds described as raising the middle of the tongue, which has the effect of pulling the tongue root to the front and consequently enlarging the pharyngeal cavity. There is a nice X-ray of an [i] articulation at the back of Preliminaries to Speech Analysis by Jakobson, Fant, and Halle. And what is more or less the opposite tongue movement is used for ы -- the tongue root is retracted so as to shrink the pharyngeal cavity and, as a consequence, lowering the middle of the tongue. See the discussion of the feature "+/- advanced tongue root" in The Sound Pattern of English.
This description gives a way of discussing the ы articulation that relates your own remark about associated pharyngealization and descriptions that make ы the back counterpart of [i], and parhaps also those that mention some sort of diphthong involving movement of the back of the tongue. The middle of the tongue and the root are connected, so moving one of them has consequences for the other.
I also want to add that Russian speakers in Ukraine often substitute [ɨ] with [ɪ], so if you can't master [ɨ], you can still use [ɪ] as well, you won't sound like a Russian from Russia, and you don't have to.
Assuming you know German, Russian ы is to и as German o is to ö and u is to ü.
