HOW TO READ RUSSIAN ALPHABET IN 3 STEPS - Sistema Kalinka

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HOW TO READ

RUSSIAN ALPHABET

IN 3 STEPS

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STEP 1:

First Letters and Words

AUDIO 01 Letters:

Welcome to our system to read Russian! Learning to read Russian letters is an easy task. Most letters have only one possible sound and there are only 33 letters to learn. Also, most of their sounds exist in English, so you will only see a few new ones.

The Russian alphabet uses letters from the Cyrillic script, an alphabet created in the 9th century. The Cyrillic alphabet is named after two brothers, Cyril and Methodius, who developed a script to put into writing different Slavic languages. In the modern version of the Russian alphabet there are 33 letters. In each of the three steps of this system we are going to learn at least 10 new letters.

Are you ready for your first word in Russian?

(yes)

[d] [a]

You can see above the word "yes" in Russian. The transcription in blue will help you understand how to pronounce each new word in our 3-step system.

Congratulations! You already know your first word in Russian. Was it difficult?

(no)

[n] [ye] [t]

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Reading practice

You already know 5 Russian letters and we have only started. Let's see if you can read them in other combinations. Listen to the audio and repeat:

Pay special attention to the letters that look like letters from the English alphabet. Some of them are pronounced like in English (the letter "T" for example), but some of them have a different sound (for example, the letter "H" has the sound [n]).

There isn't any rule for where a word is stressed in Russian. This means that you never know which syllable should be stressed. This is one of the main difficulties of reading Russian, and you have to get used to memorizing the stress of each new word. In our learning materials you will always find the words with the stress marked. In Russian books, however, the stress is usually not marked.

Letters:

Ready for more letters? You can already answer to this question in Russian, can't you? Now it's time to learn our first greeting in Russian:

(hi)

[p] [r] [i] [v] [ye] [t]

This is our first word with more than one syllable. Make sure you remember which syllable is stressed.

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Reading practice

We already know 9 letters of the Russian alphabet. That's almost a third of the entire alphabet! Let's slow down a little bit and practice those letters in different combinations:

Letters:

We will finish our first step with a simple phrase: How are things? (the Russian way of saying "How are you?"). There are only two new letters for us to learn here: and

[k] [a] [k]

? (How are things?) [d] [ye] [l] [a]

You may have noticed that we are using capital letters to write words in Russian. It doesn't mean that in Russian there are only capital letters. But usually lower-case letters are either a smaller version of the capital one ( , , , ) or they go through the same changes as letters in English ( , ).

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Reading and listening

It's time to review what we have learnt so far! Listen to the audio and try to understand the missing words from the list. Then read every word out loud:

: , , , , .......

: ......., , , , , , : , ......., , , , : , ......., , , , , : ......., , , , , : , , ......., , , : ......., , , , ,

Writing practice

As you can imagine, writing Russian letters is easy. We will do here a few writing exercises. Pay attention to this: The letter "" is very often written to avoid confusing it with "". Write these letters several times to get used to them.

..........

..........

.......... ..........

.......... ..........

.......... ..........

.......... ..........

.......... ..........

.......... ..........

.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........

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