Quick answer
The Russian alphabet (Cyrillic) has 33 letters: 10 vowels, 21 consonants and 2 signs without a sound. Russian is read almost exactly as it is written — once you know the letters, the one thing spelling will not tell you is the stress.
All 33 letters
Tap a letter to hear it in a real word. The coloured line underneath tells you how hard it is going to be.
Five letters you already know
А, К, М, О, Т look and sound the way you expect. That is enough to read your first word already: кот — cat.
Seven false friends
These are the letters that trip up every English speaker, because they look like Latin letters but stand for something else entirely. Learn them as a group:
| Looks like | Is really | Example |
|---|---|---|
| B | В = v | вода́ — water |
| E | Е = ye | нет — no |
| H | Н = n | нос — nose |
| P | Р = r | ры́ба — fish |
| C | С = s | сок — juice |
| Y | У = oo | у́тро — morning |
| X | Х = kh | хлеб — bread |
Memory trick
РЕСТОРАН is the word that makes it click: it looks like “pectopah” and means restaurant. Read it letter by letter with the table above — r-e-s-t-o-r-a-n.
You can already read these
Tap each word once you have decoded it. They are all words English borrowed or lent — so if you can read them, you know what they mean.
Six truly new sounds
Ж, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ы are the only letters that stand for sounds English does not have as a single letter. Four of them you can already make — they are just written as two letters in English: zh (pleasure), ts (cats), ch, sh. That leaves two that need practice:
Stress: the accent nobody writes
Russian spelling is honest about everything except one thing: which syllable is stressed. Books and signs never mark it, the stress can fall on any syllable, and it can move when the word changes. It also changes the vowels around it — an unstressed о sounds like an “a”:
Why Davaigo marks it
Native speakers just know. Learners have to guess, and a wrong stress can change the word. That is why every Russian word on this site carries a stress mark — до́ма, дома́ — and a recording by a native speaker.
Russian handwriting
Russians write in cursive, and three handwritten letters look like completely different Latin letters. Once you know these three, handwritten notes stop being a mystery:
| Printed | Handwritten | Looks like |
|---|---|---|
| т | т | an m |
| д | д | a g |
| и | и | a u |
The Russian keyboard
The standard layout is called ЙЦУКЕН, after its top row — the Russian version of QWERTY. It is not phonetic: Russian В sits where your D is. On a phone or computer, add “Russian” as a keyboard language and it looks like this:
Big letter: Russian. Small letter: the same key on an English keyboard.
Transliteration: spasibo, privet, da
Most people search Russian in Latin letters — “spasibo”, not спаси́бо. That is transliteration, and it is useful for exactly one thing: finding a word. For learning it is a trap, because it hides the stress and the soft consonants. Use it as a bridge, then switch to Cyrillic as soon as you can.
| Cyrillic | Latin | Cyrillic | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|
| ж | zh | щ | shch |
| х | kh | ы | y |
| ц | ts | ю | yu |
| ч | ch | я | ya |
| ш | sh | ё | yo |
Typical mistakes
Reading С as k — “kok”
сок = sok
С is always an s. Russian has its own letter for k.
Reading Р as p — “pectopah”
рестора́н = restorán
Р is the rolled r. The Russian p looks like a gate: П.
Pronouncing every О as “o”
молоко́ = malakó
Only the stressed О is a full “o”. That is why you need to know the stress.
Check yourself
How do you read СОК (juice)?