Sofia is seven, and the first Russian word she read on her own was four magnetic letters her mother had left on the refrigerator, МАМА, in a kitchen in a suburb of Sacramento. She read it without being taught, because every letter in it, the М and the А, looks and sounds almost exactly like the English M and A. That one word does most of the work of a first lesson. The Cyrillic alphabet looks like a wall from across the room, and up close a good part of it is a set of small pieces, several of which a child who already reads English half knows.
33
The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. Ten of these are vowels (а, е, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я), twenty-one are consonants, and the remaining two, the soft sign ь and the hard sign ъ, are signs that have no sound of their own and only alter the pronunciation of the preceding letter. When Sofia counts the row of magnets against a chart sent to her by her grandmother from Russia, the number she arrives at is 33. This count remains the same whether the letters are printed in a book, typed on a phone, or written by hand. The Cyrillic script used in the alphabet dates back to the ninth century and the work of Saint Cyril. However, the version a child learns today is the modern Russian alphabet, which was established after a 1918 spelling reform that eliminated four old letters.
| Letter | Sounds like | Example word |
| A a | «ah» | watermelon |
| B | «b» as in book | grandma |
| In the | «v» as in voice | water |
| G | «g as in go | year |
| D d | «d as in dog | grandpa (DYE-doosh-ka) — grandpa |
| Yes | «yes | food |
| Yeah, yeah | «yo | hedgehog |
| Zh | «like the s in measure | beetle |
| With | «z as in zoo | winter |
| And and | «ee | game |
| Y y | «y» as in boy | yogurt (YO-goort) — yogurt |
| To, to | «k as in kite | cat |
| l | «l | Summer (SUH-mer) |
| M m | «m» as in mom | mom |
| N n | «n | nose |
| Oh oh | «o | window |
| Pp | «p» as in pet | dad |
| R | rolled r« | mouth |
| With | «s as in sun | juice |
| T t | «t» as in top | there |
| In | «oo | morning |
| F f | «f as in fun | fruit |
| H h | throaty «h» as in loch | bread |
| Ts | «ts» as in cats | circus |
| Ch | «ch as in chair | tea |
| Sh | «sh | school |
| Sh | long soft «shch» | puppy |
| Y | hard sign, no sound of its own | entrance |
| Y | a deep «i» as in bit | cheese |
| "soft sign" | soft sign, no sound of its own | day |
| Uh uh | «e» as in echo | this |
| You | «yoo» | skirt |
| I am | «ya | I |
The Cyrillic letters that look familiar, and the ones that trick you
Six Russian letters are exact matches for English in both shape and sound: А, Е, К, М, О, and Т. This is why «МАМА» came so easily to Sofia. A second set consists of letters that look like English letters but represent different sounds. It is these that trip up a new reader. In the Russian alphabet, В is pronounced like «v,» Н like «n,» Р like «r,» С like «s,» У like «oo,» and Х like a throaty «h.» Sofia read «РОТ» as "rot" in her first week and was surprised to learn it is pronounced "rote" and means mouth. The rest of the alphabet consists of shapes that are new to her, including Ж, Ф, Ц, Ч, Ш, and Щ. She learns these the way she once learned that English keeps a Q around – one at a time, by encountering them in words.
How to start reading Russian
The fastest way in is the one Sofia took by accident, which is to begin with the look and sound matches and build short, real words from them before worrying about a single rule. After МАМА came папа, which added one new shape, the П that says «p.» The two silent signs, ь and ъ, are the last thing to fuss over, since they bend a neighboring sound rather than add one of their own. The letter Я is worth meeting early, because on its own it is the Russian word for «I,» said «ya,» and a child likes reading a whole word that is also one letter. None of this gets memorized from a chart in an afternoon. Sofia picked up a few letters a week off cereal boxes and the notes her mother left in her lunch, which is how reading in any alphabet is built.
The first Russian words a child wants to read
The first words a child reaches for are the names of the people she loves. Mama is «mama» and papa is «papa,» the two easiest to say because both are made of letters she already knows. Grandmother is «babushka,» pronounced "bah-boosh-kah," and grandfather is "dedushka," pronounced "dye-doosh-kah." Within the family, Sofia often shortens them to "baba" and "deda." These are longer words, so these are the ones where she first felt she was reading rather than just matching shapes. When she made a card for her grandparents, she wrote both names across the top and the country they were born in, "Rossiya," pronounced "rah-see-yah," underneath. Numbers arrive around the same time, and counting from "odin," which is one, to "desyat," which is ten, gives a child ten more short words to sound out, most of them built from letters already in hand.
Where a child picks up Cyrillic fastest
A child learns the alphabet fastest when the letters are used with other people rather than drilled alone. At our school, the groups stay small, they meet a couple of times a week, and the hour is spent reading and saying real words rather than reciting the chart. The first two lessons are free. and come one after the other. The child is first met by a methodologist who determines their level. Afterward, they receive a full lesson in a group with a teacher. This allows a parent to watch their child, who couldn't read a word of Russian in the morning, sound out a grandparent's name by the afternoon.
