Lesson 1. Learning Russian Cyrillic alphabet and Russian letter names

Hello guys! This is Lesson 1 in my Learn to Read Russian video course and it is about learning Russian Cyrillic alphabet and Russian letter names. Well, a traditional way to start learning a foreign language is to get acquainted with its alphabet. That makes sense and is what we are going to do, but we are not going to make another dull lesson out of learning Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

First of all, don’t believe those who say that there are 10 vowels and 23 consonants in the Russian alphabet. They are right about the vowels number, but there are only 21 consonants that can actually be called consonants. That’s because there are two letters in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet that NEVER make any sound. So they can’t be categorized either as vowels or as consonants.

There are three types of letters in the Russian alpabet.

The video below is about learning Russian Cyrillic alphabet and letter names. I read the alphabet three times: slowly for the first and second time and quickly for the third time. I think you might be interested how Russian people pronounce the alphabet, because apparently they don’t pronounce it as slowly as when teaching somebody! Actually, when learning Russian alphabet at school, kids try to pronounce it as fast as they can.

The first thing you should know about the Russian alphabet is that letters in words sound differently from their names. But that’s the same in English: for example, letter W (double u) is never pronounced as ‘Double U’, but as ‘v’ sound. Or letter Z is called ‘Zed’ but has the sound ‘z’ in words. So that’s easy. In next lessons we will learn sounds of Russian letters.

Another thing is that there are both uppercase and lowercase letters in the Russian alphabet, but most of them look the same. We use capital letters for peoples’ names, geographical names and so on.

There are uppercases and lowercases for Russian letters. But as you see, most of the letters are written the same.

Well, learning the Russian alphabet might seem difficult for you, but don’t worry. In next lessons we will have a closer look at the vowels, consonants, special letters that make no sound and at all the stuff like this. You will see that it’s easy and fun to learn to read Russian. Subscribe and stay tuned!