Anyway, Cyrillic script has always mystified me by looking enough like Latin script that I feel I should be able to read it, yet on closer inspection turning out to be completely alien. At some point in my life, I’d like to learn Russian, and I know to do that I really should master the Cyrillic alphabet. Language aside, I also - god knows why - feel a little silly that I can’t read it. I’m not ready to start studying another language just yet (I’m getting to grips with Spanish, and don’t want to confuse myself) - but I was thinking today - if I could find some decent novels written in the English language and the Cyrillic alphabet, I bet I’d get the hang of it in no time flat.
Would this be a good way to learn the alphabet? If so, does anyone know where I can find (download?) some novels (or short stories, or anything entertaining to read), that are written this way?
For starters, they’re not precisely equivalent. Modern Russian (for example) uses the same character for “th” and “f”, so “that fat cat” would be:
фат фат кат.
A lot of English sounds are difficult in Cyrillic or don’t have one-to-one equivalents: English j is “d+zh”, for example, and the same in reverse: ш and щ are different sounds in Russian, but both more-or-less sh in English, and ъ and ь are kind of hard to explain if you’re only thinking of English.
It really isn’t difficult to just sit down and learn it. It is about as hard as learning the Greek alphabet, and much, much, much easier than Arabic, Korean, Japanese, or Hindi alphabets. There are a lot of good resources online.
(Note to purists: I am using “alphabet” in its loosest possible sense here.)
The Cyrillic alphabet is among the easiest to learn, as Dr Drake notes. The biggest problem for most beginners seems to be false cognates. – plus rote memorization of a few characters that may or may not have direct parallels in Roman script.
Yeah, I am an atrocious student of languages, and I picked it up in a few weeks. Now, 20 years later, my Russian vocabulary is about eight words, but I can still read Cyrillic phonetically without difficulty. I don’t remember what any of the words mean, but I can tell you how they sound.
I was a better student of languages, but otherwise the same is true of me. I can’t for the life of me get the hang of the Greek alphabet (I keep trying), but Cyrillic is no problem at all, even though I can no longer understand hardly any of it. (I can remember how to say open and close!)
If you want to learn the Cyrillic alphabet (or any other alphabet or syllabary), I think the best thing to do is to make flashcards. Put the symbol on one side and its name, pronunciation, etc., on the other side. Just the process of making the flashcards will give you a good start on remembering some of the info.
Then start with just five or ten of them, whatever you are comfortable with, and do the flashcard thing with them until you know them well, and then slowly start introducing more into your pile. Spread it over a couple of days if you want, always reviewing the ones you know, and within a week or two (depending on how many symbols there are and how good you are at memorizing stuff) you should have it down pretty well.
Of course, if you don’t follow up by studying the language, you won’t retain it forever, but this is a pretty effective and easy way to learn.
Of course, some people can just sit down with a chart and memorize it, but for the rest of us, making and using flashcards works well.
It may be helpful to realize that the Cyrillic alphabet is relatively new (at least with respect to the Roman (what we use for English) and the Greek alphabets). You should consider that the Cyrillic alphabet was, to a significant degree, based on the Greek one and that there are some sound correspondences, for example the Cyrillic G looks like a Greek Capital Gamma, and the Cyrillic L looks like a warped Greek Capital Lambda. Cyrillic P, of course, looks to be inspired by Greek Pi, and of course, Cyrillic R looks like Greek Rho.
I believe that a few of the letters are actually based on Hebrew (allegedly because Greek didn’t have those sounds, but Slavic languages did, so they adopted letters based on similar sounding Hebrew letters). I believe the “Sh” sound is one of them.
One helpful way to approach learning the Cyrillic alphabet is to divide it into three classes of letters:
The ones that are (more or less) the same as the Latin alphabet:
а, к, м, о, т
These are pronounced exactly as they look:
кот (cat) is pronounced “kot”
мама (mom) is pronounced “mama”
etc.
The ones that look like Latin letters but make a different sound:
в (v), е (ye), н (n), р (r), с (s), у (u), х (kh)
The unfamiliar ones (unless you know the Greek alphabet, from which many were borrowed)
б (b), г (hard g), д (d), ё (yo), ж (zh), з (z), и (short i), й (y), л (l), п (p), ф (f), ц (ts), ч (ch), ш (sh), щ (shch but in practice an elongated sh), ъ (hard sign, modifies the preceding letter), ы (vowel sound lacking in English), ь (soft sign, modifies the previous letter in a different way), э (eh), ю (yu), я (ya)
When I was first studying Russian, the teacher gave us a handout that had a list of a hundred or so words, mostly cognates with English words, that used progressively less familiar letters. So it would start with words like мама, then move on to words like доктор (doctor) and водка (vodka), then to things like интервью (interview) that look completely alien. I think it took us about a week to get the hang of it. This site has flash cards for cognates, but it doesn’t seem to be as helpfully graduated.
Really, the alphabet is the easy part of learning Russian (or other Slavic languages).
This is the secret. Most educated people (like us!) know at least some of the Greek alphabet. Start there. I studied math and physics in college, and essentially learned the entire Greek alphabet as a result. Reading Cyrillic is a piece of cake, after a few adjustments.
Pretty much. If you know your Greek alphabet at all, you can pick up Cyrillic in basically an afternoon. Now, it can get a little tricky (but not that much more) when you start looking at italic fonts, and downright confusing when you look at cursive. (For example, “д”, in cursive, looks like a cursive “D” in uppercase and a “g” in lowercase.) Also, cursive cyrillic tends to look like a endless lines of "u"s. Click here to see what I mean. I can’t find a good example of a full Russian handwritten piece online, but it looks barely intelligible to my eyes (plus, because of all the “u”-like forms, there are lines that get placed over letters to disambiguate them.)
Cyrillic cursive is absolutely unreadable. Back when I was taking Russian I used to write out a line of homework and immediately be unable to decipher it.
This is nonsense. It’s perfectly possible to use Cyrillic to mimic English sounds, otherwise how would Russians translate English names? Russians do this all the time.
“That fat cat” can easily be written as дат фат кат. Do is far closer to “th” than F.
While the OP is not correct that Cyrillic turns out to be “completely alien”, as it is related to Greek and so on, and, of course, it is true that words and names in various languages can be transliterated, @Dr.Drake is correctly pointing out that, for instance, certain voiceless dental fricatives do not occur in Russian, and that Russian spelling does not necessarily determine how you would write an English word. If you look at, say, Mongolian Cyrillic, you will notice the use of some letters that do not occur in [modern] Russian, nor is the spelling of some word always the same as how you would transcribe it in Russian.
Some letters don’t exist like Z. There is a Zh. Offhand I can think of the lack of Th like in theater. Certainly you can convey all the words in the English language but as others mentioned, getting the correct conjugations and idioms like a native is hard - but that applies to Latin alphabet languages too.
I did want to share a key-mapping I use on my Mac where I used to type in Cyrillic: You can make the (usually useless) Caps Lock button to toggle/switch language character sets. Do-able in Windows and Linux too
