The Russian Alphabet

Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. 10 letters are vowels and 21 letters are consonants. 2 letters do not designate any sounds. Every letter can be both capital and small. The letters can also be printed or handwritten.

Here is the YouTube video that can help you to pronounce Russian letters.

Handwritten letters are cursive and they are the following:

Please, note these letters are different from print ones. You need to pay attention on how the letters are connected with each other. The advantage of knowing Russian cursive letters is that they are much faster to write as compared to print letters.

How to Set Up Russian Characters on Your Computer

If you made up your mind to study Russian first of all you should set up Russian characters on you PC. What should you do?

Go to 'Start' > 'Control Panel'. Then choose 'Regional and Language Options' . After that go to 'Languages' > 'Details'. In a new window press 'Add' and select 'Russian' from the list of languages. Press 'OK'.

After that you will be able to type Russian.

Do not forget to obtain Russian keyboard.

You can purcahse it via Internet. You can also buy or print stickers with Russian characters and glue them at your keyboard. 

There are also a lot of free programs and interesting web-sites which can help you to type Russian. Just search the web and you will find something interesting.

As for me I want to suggest you the free tool Punto Switcher  This program automatically switches keyboard format when you start typing an appropriate language. I use it by myself.

There is also a good program called Stamina It is a trainer which teaches you to type Russian using touch system.

What’s So Special About the Russian Language?

What’s so special about the Russian language? As for me, it is obviously the fact that Russian is spoken by almost 300 000 000 people in different countries but wherever you go you will easily understand each other even though there are some dialects and differences in intonation and so on. Of course I don’t mean remote villages that you and I will hardly ever visit. Compared to the English language it is very special I think. Scientists divide dialects of the Russian language into Northern and Southern. Moscow lies in between of the two.

It is typical for the Northern Russian dialect to pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly. Many southern dialects have a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the standard dialect) and a fricative [ɣ] where the standard dialect has [ɡ] and so on.

I wish I could listen to Russian as if I don’t speak it because when I listen to other languages that I don’t understand it is always interesting to imagine what this or that word could mean. Languages are like music to me. Some people I know said that Russian only sounds nice when it is spoken by a woman). Others said it sounds like somebody is vomiting. I hope it is not that bad and they just exaggerated)))