Every so often a reader of this blog will be frustrated about not being able to read Russian characters. While we will occasionally include transliteration and audio, learning to read Cyrillic is much easier that you think! There are several reasons why reading Russian is beneficial, and we will look at some relatively painless ways of learning the alphabet.<\/p>\n
There are several ways of writing Russian text in Latin characters<\/a>. These systems differ in the ways they render Russian characters in Latin script, and that inconsistency can be confusing. For example, the letter \u0445 (ha) may be transliterated as “kh,” “x,” or “h.”<\/p>\n Moreover, the reader of transliterated Russian may be tempted to fall back on the phonetic rules of their first language when sounding them out. For instance, an English speaker reading the word\u00a0zhizn’ <\/em>(\u0436\u0438\u0437\u043d\u044c, “life”)\u00a0may not realize, from the looks of the word, that “zh” is really the sound of “s” in “pleasure” and not the sound of “z” in “lizard,” and the apostrophe after the “n” makes that sound palatalized (“soft<\/a>“).<\/p>\n Learning to read Cyrillic allows you to understand international loanwords \u2014 in Russian and in other languages that use a similar alphabet. Imagine you are in a Russian city feeling illiterate because you cannot read words you would otherwise have surely recognized \u2014 \u0440\u0435\u0441\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0430\u043d, \u0431\u0430\u043d\u043a, \u043a\u0430\u0444\u0435, \u0431\u0438\u0431\u043b\u0438\u043e\u0442\u0435\u043a\u0430, \u0430\u044d\u0440\u043e\u043f\u043e\u0440\u0442, \u043c\u0430\u0433\u0430\u0437\u0438\u043d (restaurant, bank, caf\u00e9, library, airport, shop\/store), and so on. Transparent Language offers alphabet courses<\/a> within its products, but here is a quick overview of the Russian alphabet to help you start reading.<\/p>\n Both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Greek alphabet, so a few letters are generally the same. Let us look at some of these letters (capital and lowercase), their approximate pronunciation, and some examples containing the letter.<\/p>\nRecognizing\u00a0Loanwords<\/h2>\n
Letters That Look And Sound (Generally) Like in Latin Alphabets<\/h2>\n
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