Russian Alphabet for Beginners: 33 Letters With Audio

Start with a word you can read

Read кот from left to right: к, о, т. Together they make a word meaning “cat.” Familiar-looking letters give you a starting point, but learning Cyrillic is more than replacing each English letter with a Russian one. Russian spelling and sound have patterns of their own.

Now compare дом with том (volume, as in a book). One different letter changes the word. Slow down enough to identify the letters instead of guessing a word from its overall shape.

For a first session, read a handful of letters, listen to their example words, and try writing the words once. You do not need to recite the whole alphabet before reading anything. The University of Kansas alphabet and sound lesson is a useful companion with additional instruction.

All 33 Russian letters, with example audio

The sounds below are approximate reading clues, not the Russian names of the letters. A letter may sound different depending on stress and its neighbors. The accent in а́ marks a stressed vowel; ordinary Russian writing generally omits these learning marks.

Listen buttons play a bundled Slovo recording where one exists; otherwise they use your device’s Russian voice. Each button identifies the source. Device speech may be unavailable or may choose the wrong stress for an ambiguous word.

Letters that can fool English readers

Spend a separate session on В, Н, Р, С, У, Х. Their shapes encourage an English reading, but their sound clues are v, n, r, s, oo, and kh. The last sound is made with friction toward the back of the mouth; the English h is only a rough starting point.

Try нос (nose). Its first letter sounds like n and its last like s. Then read сыр (cheese): с is s, ы is an unfamiliar vowel, and р is a Russian r. Listen before trying to say it quickly.

For practice, write the misleading letters in one column and their sound clues in another. Cover the second column and recover each sound. Then return to whole words so the letters do not remain an isolated memorization task.

What the two signs do

Ь, the soft sign, has no separate vowel sound. It often marks softness in the consonant before it, as in день (day). Some spellings use it for grammatical reasons, so do not treat it as a universal instruction to add an extra “ee.”

Ъ, the hard sign, also has no sound of its own. In words such as подъе́зд (entrance), it separates a hard consonant from a following iotated vowel letter. Learn the word with audio rather than trying to pronounce the sign by itself.

The vowel letters е, ё, ю, я also need context. At the start of a word they typically begin with a y-like sound. After many consonants they indicate softness plus a vowel. These are useful introductory patterns; later examples will show additional spelling details.

Read your first words

Read this sequence without looking at the English meanings: дом, там, ма́ма, нос, кни́га. Then check: house/home, there, mum, nose, book. Listen to each word in the chart or the interactive alphabet practice.

Finish by copying Э́то мой дом. — “This is my home.” Identify each letter, then read the sentence as a whole. Tomorrow, return to the same sentence before adding new ones. For the next step, practice Russian pronunciation or learn a short exchange from our everyday phrasebook.

Common questions