Cyrillic is the part of Russian that frightens people off and the part that takes the least time. Thirty-three letters, most of them regular, and a week of reading aloud badly is genuinely enough to become fluent at decoding.

It helps to sort them into four groups rather than meeting them as one undifferentiated wall.

Group one: the ones you already know

Several Cyrillic letters look like Latin letters and sound like them too: the A, the K, the M, the O and the T all behave much as you would expect. That is a free head start on roughly a sixth of the alphabet.

Group two: the false friends

These are the ones that catch everybody, and they are worth learning first precisely because they will mislead you otherwise:

• The letter shaped like a Latin B is pronounced v.
• The letter shaped like a Latin H is pronounced n.
• The letter shaped like a Latin P is pronounced r.
• The letter shaped like a Latin C is pronounced s.
• The letter shaped like a Latin X is pronounced like the ch in loch.
• The letter shaped like a Latin Y is pronounced oo.

Six letters, and they account for most beginner misreadings. Learn these six deliberately and the rest of the alphabet gives you very little trouble.

Group three: the Greek borrowings

If you have met Greek letters in maths or science, a number of Cyrillic characters will already be familiar in shape if not in sound. Russian took its alphabet from Greek by way of Old Church Slavonic, and the family resemblance is still visible.

Group four: the two that make no sound

Russian has two characters, usually called the soft sign and the hard sign, which are not pronounced at all. They change the consonant in front of them: the soft sign palatalises it, which means the tongue moves towards the position for a y sound while the consonant is being made.

Palatalisation is a real distinction in Russian and it separates words. English speakers find it the hardest thing about Russian pronunciation, well ahead of the rolled r or the ch in loch.

You never have to type it here

Almost nobody has a Russian keyboard layout installed, so demanding Cyrillic input would test your keyboard rather than your Russian.

Every typed answer on this site accepts Latin transliteration as well as Cyrillic. Writing spasibo is as correct as writing it in Cyrillic, and where we show a text box we say so on the box. The reading comes first; the typing can wait until you have a layout and a reason.