The Russian alphabet

Cyrillic is one of the quickest scripts for English speakers to learn: a handful of letters look and sound like Latin ones, many others are borrowed from Greek, and most learners can read slowly within a few days. The traps are the 'false friends' (В = v, Н = n, Р = r, С = s, У = u, Х = kh) and the soft and hard signs (ь, ъ), which have no sound of their own. Beyond the alphabet, focus on word stress: it is not marked in normal text and it changes how vowels sound, especially unstressed о (pronounced like a).

How to learn it fast

• Start with the five 'true friends' (А, К, М, О, Т) and the false friends (В, Е, Н, Р, С, У, Х): learning which familiar shapes lie to you is the biggest early win.
• Practise reading words you already know: ресторан (restoran), такси (taksi), кофе (kofe), метро (metro), телефон (telefon). Decoding international words builds speed fast.
• Learn the four 'y-vowels' as a set: я (ya), е (ye), ё (yo), ю (yu). After a consonant they drop the y sound and instead soften that consonant.
• Use learner materials with stress marks (молоко́). Stress is never written in ordinary text, and unstressed о and е change their sound.
• Get used to handwriting and italics early: т is written like a Latin m in cursive, д like g, and и like u.
• Set up the Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard rather than relying on phonetic typing; it pays off within a week of regular use.

Did you know?

• The Cyrillic alphabet is named after Saint Cyril, but he and his brother Methodius actually created Glagolitic; Cyrillic was developed afterwards by their disciples in the First Bulgarian Empire.
• The 1918 spelling reform removed the letters ѣ (yat), і, ѳ (fita) and ѵ (izhitsa), and dropped the hard sign ъ from the ends of words, where it had been silent but obligatory.
• The letter ё was popularized in the late 18th century (Princess Yekaterina Dashkova is credited with proposing it), yet most Russian texts still print it as е without dots.
• The letter ы almost never begins a word in Russian; it appears word-initially only in a few place names and loanwords.
• Cyrillic is also used for Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Kazakh, Mongolian and many other languages, each with its own set of letters.