Having problems with the Russian alphabet?

Note from the Editor:

There are many people who say that they are struggling to learn the Russian alphabet. You are not alone in this problem! It is hard at first, but it's not insurmountable. Some people can't sit down and just rote-learn the alphabet, so they need a different learning strategy. So what follows is perhaps a slower but more interesting way to learn the alphabet.

First you need to get interested in the Russian letters and the alphabet .. don't just try to launch into the whole thing .. well, not at the beginning anyway.

Pick a word you really want to learn.

For me, it was 'Hello', and 'you are very beautiful' (obviously these weren't intended for Russia-Australia trade relations.. :)

So I scoured the internet for some pages that would show me the Russian translation for these words.

For 'hello' I found Здравствуйте and Привет .. so I decided to investigate Привет (Здравствуйте just looked a little bit too scary :)

Then I looked up a site that showed me what each Russian letter translates into English:

П = p
р = r (what tha..?)
и = i
в = v (are they serious..?)
е = ye
т = t

put them together and you have "privyet"! This is the Russian word for 'Hi!'.

There I had my first Russian word..and some clue what each of the letters meant.

Then I looked up 'you are very beautiful' and found 'ты очень красивая' and commenced with the same procedure of translating each letter and forming complete words.

Using this method reduced anxiety about learning the alphabet because I was learning something useful that I could apply straight away.

After doing this for a while I still found that I wasn't able to recall all the letters. Some letters were easy, but others like 'ч' (ch) and 'ю' (yu) always seemed to slip my mind.

The only solution was to put in the hard work, and to be honest, if you don't put in some consistent practice at the beginning then you will struggle with the alphabet for longer than necessary. Don't kid yourself, you need to do some consistent, uninterrupted study on this.

So I made a Word document that listed the Russian alphabet down several columns (see previous webpage), with a space next to each letter for me to fill in the blank. Then I printed about 30 copies of this page and proceeded to rote-learn the alphabet in groups of 3 letters. Three letters aren't hard to memorise. Some letters were already familiar to me, like "а, м, о, т", and others I learnt by writing them over and over again.

Really it's not too hard to learn the alphabet if you have the motivation and can follow this procedure. But it does take some work, perhaps 15 minutes a day for 2 weeks, until you can read each letter quite comfortably. But mix the rote-learning with some words you really want to learn, because rote-learning on its own can be tough for some people.

Don't expect to be able to read whole words quickly ..I still have trouble with this for unfamiliar words .. but once you can read each letter then you will feel like you have cracked the code and now belong to the select few English-speaking people who can decipher the Russian alphabet.

Good luck! You can do it! and please contact me if you need any further help.

Jonathon