Try this before you read another word: РЕСТОРАН. Sound it out, letter by letter. R–E–S–T–O–R–A–N. You just read Russian. The fox here — and my whole pitch is that Cyrillic is a 30-minute job, not the wall people think it is. Of Russian's 33 letters, about a third you already know, seven are lying to you, and the rest are new shapes for sounds your mouth already makes.
Published 10 June 2026
Here's the whole trick: don't learn the alphabet in alphabetical order. Learn it in four groups, easiest first. Grab a coffee. By the bottom of the cup you'll be sounding out МЕТРО on a map without thinking about it.
А, К, М, О, Т look like Latin letters and sound like them too. That's it. You now read words like КОТ (kot — cat) and АТОМ (atom). One minute, five letters down, morale up.
These look familiar but make a different sound. They're the only genuinely annoying part of Cyrillic, so give them the most attention:
My advice: drill just these seven for ten minutes. Every horror story about "Cyrillic being impossible" is really a story about someone reading С as a c.
These look alien but behave perfectly. Б = b, Г = g, Д = d, З = z, И = ee, Л = l, П = p, Ф = f, Э = e. Some of them you half-know already: Д is a delta wearing a hat, Ф is phi, П is pi — thank the Greeks, Cyrillic borrowed heavily from their alphabet in the 9th century. Then come the sound-bundles English writes with two letters: Ж = zh (the s in pleasure), Ц = ts, Ч = ch, Ш = sh, Ю = yu, Я = ya. One symbol per sound. Honestly tidier than English, which spells the sh-sound at least four different ways.
Left over: Ы (an "i" said from the back of your throat — say "bill" while grimacing and you're close), Й (a quick y-glide, as at the end of boy), Щ (a longer, softer sh), and two letters with no sound at all — Ь softens the letter before it, Ъ keeps two sounds apart. You'll meet them rarely and they'll never stop you reading a menu.
Cover the answers and read these: БАНК · ПАРК · ТАКСИ · КОФЕ · МОСКВА. (Bank, park, taxi, coffee, Moscow.) That's a real Russian street you just read. The letters stop being the obstacle today; from here it's just vocabulary and grammar — for that, start with where to actually start with Russian, and if you want the sober difficulty check first, here's our honest take on how hard Russian is.
Is Russian Cyrillic the same as Serbian Cyrillic? Close cousins. Serbian has six letters Russian lacks (ђ, ћ, џ, љ, њ, ј); Russian keeps ё, й, щ, э, ю, я, ы and the silent signs. Read one and the other costs you ten minutes.
Do I need cursive? Not yet. Printed letters cover apps, signs and subtitles. Cursive can wait until reading print is automatic.
Can I skip Cyrillic and use transliteration? For a week, maybe. But real Russian isn't written in Latin letters, and the alphabet costs half an hour. Worst trade in language learning.
PS — Russian is coming to Gora, where I'll happily drill these letters with you until they're boring. Montenegrin's live now if you fancy warming up on a Slavic language with a friendlier alphabet.