русский алфавит (russkiy alfavit)
The Russian alphabet is a form of Cyrillic with 33 letters: 10 vowels, 21 consonants and two signs that have no sound of their own. Several letters look like Latin ones but stand for different sounds.
Tap a letter to hear it; the small ▶ plays the example word. Practice mode hides names and sounds until you tap a card.
Some letters look like Latin ones but sound different: В = v, Н = n, Р = r, С = s, У = u, Х = kh. So РЕСТОРАН reads restoran (restaurant) and ХОР reads khor (choir). А, К, М, О and Т are close to their Latin look-alikes.
Stress can fall on any syllable and is not marked in normal writing. Unstressed о sounds like a: молоко (milk) is said “malako”, вода (water) “vada”. Unstressed е and я sound close to i. Learner books and dictionaries mark stress with an accent: молоко́.
In most books, newspapers and websites ё is printed without its dots, so ёлка (fir tree) appears as елка. You have to know the word. Ё is always stressed, which tells you where the stress is when the dots are shown.
Most consonants have a hard and a soft (palatalised) version, as if a faint y were blended in. A consonant is soft before е, ё, и, ю, я and before ь: мат (checkmate) vs мать (mother). Ж, ш and ц are always hard; ч, щ and й are always soft.
Ъ and ь have no sound of their own. Ь softens the consonant before it, and before a vowel it also adds a y-sound: семья (family) is sem-ya. Ъ appears before е, ё, ю, я to keep the consonant hard and add a y-sound: подъезд (entrance), объявление (announcement).
At the end of a word, б, в, г, д, ж, з are said like п, ф, к, т, ш, с: хлеб (bread) sounds like “khlep”, друг (friend) like “druk”. The same happens before a voiceless consonant: ложка (spoon) sounds like “loshka”.
Audio is synthetic speech generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Chirp 3: HD voices). Letter inventory checked against Unicode CLDR.