Hear you will get familiar with all those strange unreadable symbols you may have seen on the TV screen or elsewhere. You will understand that they are quite readable as well as Latin symbols. Primarily Russian letters will be introduced as small pics in a table since you still might not have the cyrillic support on your computer ( click here to tackle this problem ), but after the table and in all following lessons only cyrillic font will be used in writing Russian words, so make sure that your browser is capable of reading Russian letters.

In the following table all of the 33 letters (both in upper and lower case) which Russian alphabet comprises are presented, along with their rough English equivalents. More detailed consideration of pronunciation rules is still to follow.
 
 

	a		i		s		-
	b		j		t		i, y
	v		k		u		-
	g		l		f		e
	d		m		h		u, ju
	e, je		n		ts		a, ja
	o, jo		o		ch
	zh		p		sh
	z		r		shch

Note that these are only transliteration, not pronunciation rules.

All present-day Russian letters are derived from ancient cyrillic alphabet by means of excluding some out-of-date letters and simplifying their writing form. The first reform of Russian alphabet was undertaken in 1708-1710 by Peter the Great and then in years 1735, 1738 and 1758 by the Russian Academy of Sciences. But 3 remaining unnecessary letters remained until 1917 when they were finally abolished.
Special care should be taken of the letter "Ё", introduced in 1797 by Russian author N.Karamzin, since it is used nowhere except for the teaching aids, you won't see it anywhere in Russian papers, it is even not present on the Russian keyboard, it is always replaced with the letter "Е", and as these letters are pronounced differently it will be difficult for a learner to know which sound to pronounce when seeing the letter "Е" in a word. In fact, all the words with the letter "Ё" should be learned by heart, and there many of them. So to help learners I will use the letter "Ё" in writing words. By the way, there is no "Ё" letter in Ukrainian, combination "ЬО" is used instead, so there is no such problem as described above in Ukrainian.

You probably noticed that letters "Ъ" (hard sign) and "Ь" (soft sign) have no Latin equivalents. That is because these letters are never pronounced in Russian, the former one is used only as a partitive letter between the prefix and the root of the word, e.g. съесть (to have eaten), the latter is used as a softening sign telling that the consonant after which it is written must be palatalized (softened), compare мол (particle used in retelling the other person's words) - моль (moth). Soft sign is also used as a partitive sign but mainly in the root of the word, e.g. пьёт ((he) drinks), it is used to underline some grammatical features (feminine gender, imperative mood) as well.

The letter "Ы" can never start a word except for the very rare words borrowed from Korean, Kazakh and Siberian languages.
The letter "Й" also very rarely starts a word.

There a lot of peoples that use cyrillic alphabet, mainly those inhabiting the territory of the former USSR. Among the Slavic languages 4 languages use cyrillic alphabet: Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. However their alphabets are  slightly different from the Russian one.

In the next table the names of all Russian letters are presented
 

Letter	Name	Letter	Name	Letter	Name	Letter	Name
Аа	а	Ии	и	Сс	эс	Ъъ	твердый знак (hard sign)
Бб	бэ	Йй	и краткое (short и)	Тт	тэ	Ыы	ы
Вв	вэ	Кк	ка	Уу	у	Ьь	мягкий знак (soft sign)
Гг	гэ	Лл	эль	Фф	эф	Ээ	э
Дд	дэ	Мм	эм	Хх	ха	Юю	ю
Ее	е	Нн	эн	Цц	це	Яя	я
Ёё	ё	Оо	о	Чч	че
Жж	же	Пп	пэ	Шш	ша
Зз	зэ	Рр	эр	Щщ	ща

You can get an mp3 with all these names in a row here.

Sorry, this page is under construction.
Created - 11.06.99.
Last updated - 14.06.99.