Learn Cyrillic! It's Cool!

BasicsofEast SlavicCyrillic

Introduction & part 1

Hello! My pseudonym is Marii̯ka Nguyá»n.

I joined Mastodon.social after I left the other social media website - Trust Cafe. On TrustCafe, I used to work on a series of short posts that'd teach Anglophones to read East Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. And I want to continue this project here on Mastodon.social.

East Slavic languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Rusyn.

What I want to do is write a series of posts that will teach you Cyrillic without overloading you with new information or making you feel not smart enough to learn a new writing system. I'm no teacher, but hopefully this improvised course will be helpful for somebody.

Cyrillic alphabets are normal alphabets with letters for vowels and consonants and a few "non-letter" marks.

If you know Latin letters (you surely do if you're on this site), you can already read some Cyrillic letters:

Cyrillic	Pronunciation
Ð	Like Latin 'R'
Ð	Like Latin 'O'
Ð	Like Latin 'I'
М	Like Latin 'M'
К	Like Latin 'K'
Т	Like Latin 'T'
Е	Like Latin 'Ye' or 'E' (explained below)

Let's break it down:

• Ð is for vowels like "u" in "cut" or "a" in "arm".
• Ð is what you have in "off" and "dawn".
• Ð is like the vowel in "seed" and "meet".
• Ðœ: "mother", "man"
• К: "rock", "calendar"
• Т: "time", "cat"

In Ukrainian and Rusyn (but not in Russian and Belarusian), "Е" is similar to Latin "E": it's the sound as in "neck", "get".

Keep practicing!

More to come soon! Keep checking back!