Russian · the alphabet
The Russian alphabet: 33 letters.
Russian is written in Cyrillic: 33 letters, of which 10 are vowels, 21 are consonants, and 2 are silent signs. About a third look and sound familiar, a third look familiar but sound different, and a third are genuinely new. Two or three focused hours cover all of them.
Aurélien CuvelierAug 10, 2026The full alphabet, letter by letter
Every letter with its Russian name, the closest English sound, and a real word from the NuanceDeck dictionary with its stress marked.
Learn it in five groups
Sorting the 33 letters by how they treat an English speaker turns the alphabet from a wall into an afternoon.
The friends
А К М О Т
Look like their Latin twins and sound like them too. You can already read them; five letters are free.
The false friends
В Е Н Р С У Х
The dangerous group: familiar shapes wearing different sounds. В is v, Н is n, Р is a rolled r, С is s, У is oo, Х is the loch sound, Е is ye. РЕСТОРАН reads restoran; your eyes will fight you for a week, then surrender.
New shapes, familiar sounds
Б Г Д З И Й Л П Ф Э Ю Я
Nothing here your mouth cannot already do; only the drawings are new. Б is b, Г is g, Д is d, Л is l, П is p. Flashcard material, not phonetics practice.
The genuinely new sounds
Ж Ц Ч Ш Щ Ы
Six letters worth actual ear time. Ж buzzes like the s in pleasure, Ц snaps like ts in cats, Ш and Щ are a hard and a soft sh, and Ы is an i said deep in the mouth; it has no English twin, and that is fine.
The two signs
Ъ Ь
Neither makes a sound. The soft sign Ь softens the consonant before it (день, day); the rare hard sign Ъ inserts a tiny separation inside a word (подъезд, entrance hall). They are punctuation for the mouth.
Ten vowels, five pairs
The vowels come in matched pairs: а/я, э/е, о/ё, у/ю, ы/и. Each soft partner says its hard partner's sound with a y-glide in front, or signals that the consonant before it is soft. Learn five sounds and two rules instead of ten letters, and the system carries you.
One vowel earns special respect: ё is always stressed, which is why ёлка and подъём never need a stress mark. Printed Russian often writes it as plain е, a habit that torments learners; NuanceDeck always writes the dots.
About Russian cursive
Russian cursive is famous for a reason: handwritten т looks like an m, и looks like a u, д can look like a g, and a word like лишишь dissolves into a row of identical humps. Even Russians joke about it.
The practical advice: learn to READ printed Russian first, and do not let cursive block you. Italic fonts mimic handwriting shapes (printed т becomes т-as-m in italics), so you will meet the problem gradually in book titles and menus before anyone asks you to write a dictation.
Everything in NuanceDeck uses clear print letterforms with the stressed vowel colored, so the alphabet you learn here is the alphabet you will read everywhere online.
How long does it take?
Honestly: two or three focused hours to learn all 33 letters and start sounding out words. What takes longer is unlearning the false friends: give it a few days of reading before В stops whispering b at you, and a week or two before street signs read themselves. The alphabet is the cheapest win in all of Russian; the grammar will take years, the letters take an afternoon.
The one rule that matters: stop transliterating immediately. Reading privet instead of привет feels helpful for a day and then holds you back for months. Every word in NuanceDeck is Cyrillic-first, with the stress shown, so the crutch never forms.
Next: how to actually learn Russian, honestly ›
Learn the alphabet, then the 7,500 words after it
The Russian alphabet: common questions
How many letters are in the Russian alphabet?
Thirty-three: 10 vowels (а, е, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я), 21 consonants, and 2 silent signs (ъ, ь). That is seven more than English, but about a dozen of them are instantly familiar.
What is the Russian alphabet called?
Cyrillic (кириллица), named after Saint Cyril, the 9th-century Byzantine missionary whose students developed it. Russian uses a 33-letter variant; Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian use their own Cyrillic variants with small differences.
What alphabet does Russia use?
Cyrillic, not the Latin alphabet. Every official, printed and online Russian text uses the 33-letter Russian Cyrillic alphabet; there is no parallel Latin system beyond informal transliteration.
Is the Russian alphabet hard to learn?
It is the easiest part of Russian by a wide margin. Most letters map one letter to one sound, far more regularly than English spelling. The only real friction is the false friends (В, Н, Р, С, У, Х) and, later, cursive. A couple of focused hours covers the letters; a few days of reading makes them automatic.
What are the letters Ъ and Ь?
The hard sign and the soft sign. Neither has a sound of its own: ь softens the consonant before it (день), while the rare ъ marks a small separation inside a word (подъезд). They change how neighbors are pronounced, like silent traffic signs.
Why does Russian cursive look so different?
Handwritten letterforms diverged from print: cursive т resembles m, и resembles u, and strings of и, ш, л blur into humps. Read print first; cursive is a separate, later skill, and italic fonts will introduce you to its shapes gradually.
Written by
Aurélien Cuvelier Founder, NuanceDeck
Aurélien Cuvelier builds NuanceDeck: the app, and the verification pipeline behind its dictionary. Every entry is grounded in the official TORFL lexical minimum and a 20,000-word frequency corpus, and every example sentence passes a certification review before it ships.
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