Cyrillic, or, learning to read in Russian.

привет ребята!

The Russian project continues everyone! It's not been a quick business, but as they say на русском: Тише едешь - дальше будешь. "He who goes slowly goes far."

One of my first goals in tackling a language such as this is learning the writing system. Especially as a person who has taking phonology and can read IPA, nothing makes me cringe quite like romanized Cyrillic. (Or romanized anything for that matter. Except pinyin. Pinyin is a glorious gift from above! But more on that later.)

So yes. Russian uses a different alphabet. Welcome to Cyrillic! A fairly old writing system derived from Greek, Cyrillic has 33 letters and is used for multiple languages in Europe and Eastern Asia, especially languages of Slavic origin. Though it varies slightly from language to language, these are the current letters used in the Russian alphabet:

 А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я

Pretty awesome right? Yeah. It's pretty scary at first. But I had a pretty good system for learning the letters. The letters fall into three types. The first group are letters that look exactly like the Latin letters and also represent the same sounds! These include А, Т, М, and К for instance. Pronounced just like the English. I "learned" those first. Which basically just meant remembering that I already knew them! The second group are the ones that look nothing like letters in the Latin alphabet. Those took some more work. (Д, Ш, З, П, Ж, Ю, Г among others). There are a lot of those. The last group are the ones that look like you should be able to know them but they are really false friends. Out to trick you and make you embarrass yourself when you're trying to read Russian words. For instance, the sound В in Russian is equivalent to our letter V.  What?! What's more, Н makes an "n" sound, Р makes a trilled "r" sound, and Я, which first looked to me like a backwards R, is actually a VOWEL and is pronounced "ya." WHAT.

Honestly though, this isn't too bad as far as learning new writing systems go. I don't have to go memorize 3000 non-phonetic, stroke-ordered characters like you do in Chinese. I don't have to learn to read backwards as you will have to in many Semitic languages.

At this point, I feel that I've gotten a really good feel for Cyrillic. I know the sounds really well! Point at a Cyrillic letter and I can tell you how to pronounce it. Except for Ш and Щ. Oh, and also Ь and Ъ. And I forgot Ы! Maybe I should specify: I can explain to you how the letter should be pronounced in the event that you are lucky enough to be able to make the sounds with your mouth.

Oh boy. It's a party. This is why learning languages is so fun. :)

Stay tuned for part 2: learning how to write in Cyrillic!