Russian alphabet: vowels

Russian grammar: Russian alphabet

Welcome to Learn Russian Step by Step! This is the place where you will start doing your first steps in the captivating journey of learning the Russian language. All you need to succeed in this endeavour is your motivation and a bit of patience and perseverance.

In this lessons, we start learning the Russian alphabet.

An introduction to the Russian alphabet

Russian alphabet was derived from the Cyrillic one and includes 33 letters: 10 vowels, 21 consonants and 2 letters that are neither one or the other.

You can divide all the Russian letters into four groups:

1. Letters that look and sound like in English (A, O, T, M etc.),
2. Letters that look like in English but sound differently (P [r], У [oo], B [v] etc.),
3. Letters that sound like in English but look differently (Ф [f], И [ee], Л [l] etc.),
4. And the last group of Russian letters includes new to an English speaker sounds and looks (Ъ, Ь, Ы).

Despite the fact the some of the Russian sounds are close to the English ones, you should not forget that they are not absolutely identical. You will need some practice to get a perfect Russian accent.

Learn Russian vowels

Russian vowels form two groups – 5 pairs – where one vowel in a pair sounds like a soft version of the other.

Let’s start with the “not soft” ones:

А а – [ a ] (like ‘a’ in ‘far’)

О о – [ o ] (like ‘o’ in ‘not’)

У у – [ u ] (like ‘u’ in ‘sugar’)

Э э – [ e ] (like ‘e’ in ‘edit’)

Ы ы – [ y ] (has no equivalent in English)

The Russian letter Ы causes a lot of trouble to those not having this sound in their native language. To pronounce the Russian Ы correctly, you need to place your tongue in the position between the positions for I in kit and U in sugar. Make a sound, somewhat close to trying to say U with your lips opens for I. The correctly pronounced letter Ы should remind you of the sound that one makes being hit in the stomach. 🙂

Now, have a look at the following list: there are 5 pairs of vowels, where the first vowel in the pair is already familiar to you, and the second one is derived from its counterpart by adding “y” to soften the sound:

А а [ a ] – Я я [ ya ] (like ‘yu’ in ‘yummy’)

О о [ o ] – Ё ё [ yo ] (like ‘yo’ in ‘yours’)

У у [ u ] – Ю ю [ yu ] (like ‘yu’ in ‘you’)

Э э [ e ] – Е е [ ye ] (like ‘ye’ in ‘yes’ or ‘e’ in ‘exit’)

Ы ы [ y ] – И и [ ee ] (like ‘ée’ in ‘free’)

The only pair that does not really follow the pattern is Ы – И. Listen to the audio to feel the difference in the pronunciation.

And this is it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we will continue learning the Russian alphabet and have a look at the Russian consonants.

Update: we have also created the whole site to learn the Russian alphabet easy and free. Don’t hesitate to check it out!

The offline version of this lesson is available here

• 002. Russian alphabet: consonants