Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to recognize and pronounce the Cyrillic alphabet, including letters that look deceptively familiar but sound completely different.

Lesson Explanation

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters and uses the Cyrillic script — a genuinely different starting point from every other language covered in this course catalog, where the Latin alphabet was already familiar. Learning to read Cyrillic accurately is the single biggest initial hurdle in Russian, and it pays off quickly once past it.

Some letters are genuinely straightforward, looking and sounding close to their English equivalents: А, К, М, О, Т sound roughly like “a, k, m, o, t.”

The genuinely dangerous group is letters that LOOK like familiar Latin letters but sound completely different — these cause real, persistent errors if not addressed directly: В sounds like “v” (not “b”); Н sounds like “n” (not “h”); Р sounds like a rolled “r” (not “p”); С sounds like “s” (not “c”); У sounds like “oo” (not “y”); Х sounds like a harsh “h” (not “x”).

Entirely new letters with no Latin equivalent include Б (b), Г (g), Д (d), Ж (zh, like “s” in “measure”), З (z), Л (l), П (p), Ф (f), Ц (ts), Ч (ch), Ш (sh), Щ (a softer “shch”), Ы (a distinctive vowel with no English equivalent, between “i” and “u”), Э (e), Ю (yu), Я (ya).

Two genuinely important “silent” letters have no sound of their own but change the pronunciation of the preceding consonant: Ь (the “soft sign,” softening/palatalizing the consonant before it) and Ъ (the “hard sign,” genuinely rare in modern Russian, mainly separating a prefix from a following vowel). The soft sign is covered further as it affects verb endings throughout this course.

Practice Questions