Russian

The Cyrillic Alphabet
Objective: To learn the entire Cyrillic Alphabet, to decent reading speed. TOCright The Russian language is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, coming from Bulgaria. To read more about this alphabet go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet.This alphabet, in slightly modified forms, is also used by other Slavic and Soviet non-Slavic languages. The alphabet has many similarities to the Latin and Greek alphabets, as well as borrowing a few letters from Hebrew.

The Russian Cyrillic Alphabet has 33 letters. As with any foreign language approximation, the romanizations given are only approximations of the sounds.

The sheer size of the alphabet can be intimidating, but after a little practice, reading Russian can become as easy as reading English. An advantage English learners have is that Russian letters hold very closely to expected pronunciation, meaning, they don't change much between words, like the English T in strong, tomb, attack, and thought.

Edit

Romanization

The romanization used in this book tries to approximate English sound as much as possible. As such, the romanization given will always provide that pronunciation, even if the Russian spelling changes.

Some important things to know:

• The Romanization given is always in italics, and most of the time in (parentheses).
• Russian has stresses inside words just like English. Stress is indicated with CApital LEtters, in the ROmaniZAtion ONly. When stress is necessary in Cyrillic, an apostrophe (') will be placed before the accented syllable, like the 'following termi'nologies, vo'cabularies, and 'general 'English words.
  • In actual Russian (except for some dictionaries), stress is denoted with an accent character ( ́) on top of the stressed vówel, if néeded for disambiguátion or in ráre words.