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The Russian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic alphabet, which was named after the ninth-century Byzantine monk Cyril (see the sidebar “Who was this Cyril guy, anyway?” later in this chapter). Over a period of centuries, many attempts were made to shorten Cyril’s original alphabet from its original 43 letters. Today, the alphabet is still pretty lengthy — 33 letters in all, compared with 26 letters in the English alphabet. But don’t panic. Throughout this book, every Russian word or phrase is accompanied by its phonetic transcription so you can see how to pronounce it. (We convert the Russian letters to familiar Latin symbols, which are the same symbols that the English alphabet uses.)

This isn’t to say, however, that English and Russian sounds are completely the same; they absolutely aren’t. (See the later section “Sounding Like a Real Russian with Proper Pronunciation” for details.) But because your chances of learning to sound like a real Russian just by reading this book are rather slim, we use what phoneticians call approximation and consider most English sounds and their Russian counterparts to be the same, as long as native speakers of Russian have no difficulty recognizing them. Yes, Russians will discern your accent as not being authentic, but at the very least, they’ll be able to understand you!

Table 2-1 has the details on Cyrillic letters. In the first column, you see the uppercase and lowercase versions of the letter, respectively. The second column shows how the Russian letters are pronounced, using familiar English letters and example words. The third column of the table indicates whether the letter is a vowel or a consonant:

 You may remember from your English classes that vowels are the sounds that are usually said with an open mouth, without stopping the flow of air coming from the lungs. The English letters A, E, I, O, and U are vowels.

 Letters like B, K, L, M, N, P, and T are consonants: They’re all pronounced with some sort of obstruction that gets in the way of the air coming out of your lungs.

You may wonder why you need this information — another burden for your poor memory! Believe it or not, knowing whether the sound is a vowel or a consonant comes in handy in helping you understand some very important grammatical rules as you delve deeper into the language.

Play Track 1 to hear the pronunciation of the Russian alphabet.

Note the letter Йй in Table 2-1. Scholars don’t agree on this one: Some believe it’s a consonant; others think it’s a vowel. We don’t want to take sides in this matter, so we list it as both a consonant and a vowel.

Our advice for you is to first divide the alphabet into three or even four parts of about nine or ten letters. Go over each part as many times as necessary to memorize letter-sound correspondences while you listen to Track 1. (We provide extra help in the later section “Sounding Like a Real Russian with Proper Pronunciation.”) Test yourself a couple of times: Cover the pronunciation column in Table 2-1, and say out loud the sound that corresponds to each Russian letter. If you forget a sound, you can peek at the corresponding English letter. Keep at it until you can say each letter. And keep the table handy for future reference!

TABLE 2-1 The Russian Alphabet

Russian Letter	Pronunciation	Vowel or Consonant
Aa	ah in a stressed syllable, as the a in father; uh in an unstressed syllable, as the u in upstage	Vowel
Бб	b as in book; p at the end of a word	Consonant
Bв	v as in valve; f at the end of a word	Consonant
Гг	g as in grotto; k at the end of a word	Consonant
Дд	d as in dad; t at the end of a word	Consonant
Ee	yeh in a stressed syllable, as the ye in yes or yesterday; ee in an unstressed syllable, as in beet or birdseed	Vowel
Ёё	yoh as the yo in yoke	Vowel
Жж	zh as the s in pleasure; sh at the end of a word	Consonant
Зз	z as in zoo; s at the end of a word	Consonant
Ии	ee as in beet	Vowel
Йй	very short y as in York	Vowel and consonant
Кк	k as in key	Consonant
Лл	l as in lamp	Consonant
Mм	m as in mom	Consonant
Hн	n as in no	Consonant
Oo	oh in a stressed syllable, as the o in opus; ah in an unstressed syllable, as the a in father	Vowel
Пп	p as in parrot	Consonant
Pp	r as in red	Consonant
Cc	s as in so	Consonant
Tт	t as in tea	Consonant
Уу	ooh as the oo in shoot	Vowel
Фф	f as in flag	Consonant
Xx	kh like you’re clearing your throat or like the ch in Scottish loch	Consonant
Цц	ts as in tsetse fly	Consonant
Чч	ch as in chair	Consonant
Шш	sh as in whoosh	Consonant
Щщ	soft sh as in sheep or sherbet	Consonant
ъ	A “hard sign,” transcribed as ” but not pronounced, so for the purposes of this book, we just ignore it!	Neither
Ы	i as in bit	Vowel
ь	A “soft sign” that makes the preceding consonant soft; we show it as ’.	Neither
Ээ	eh as the e in end	Vowel
Юю	yooh as the Yu in Yukon	Vowel
Яя	ya as in yahoo if stressed; ee if unstressed and not in the final syllable of a word; yeh if unstressed and in the final syllable of a word	Vowel