Читать книгу Russian For Dummies - Serafima Gettys - Страница 11

If you were to ask people on the street what they think the most difficult thing about learning Russian is, most of them (slightly taken aback by your question) would likely say, “The alphabet!”

But we’re here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth: The Russian alphabet is perhaps the easiest part of learning Russian. In fact, you may be surprised to hear that most people are able to start reading Russian in several hours. That’s how easy the Russian alphabet is!

Don’t believe us? Consider this: The Russian alphabet, often called the Cyrillic alphabet, was named after a ninth-century Byzantine monk named Cyril, who developed it with the help of his brother, Methodius. (Please don’t ask us why Methodius’s name wasn’t added to the name of the alphabet. Life isn’t fair.) Cyril and Methodius wanted to translate the Bible into one of the Slavic languages spoken by the Eastern European pagan tribes, because the brothers were planning to convert those tribes to Christianity. These languages had never been written down before. When the brothers were creating their alphabet, they borrowed quite a few letters from the Latin alphabet to indicate the sounds produced by the tribes. Luckily for those tribes (and for anyone studying Russian), a lot of the borrowed letters sound the same in Russian as they do in any Latin-based alphabet (like English).

Are you ready to jump in and start reading Russian? Chapter 2 shows you how to sound out the letters of the Russian alphabet.