Russian Alphabet Made Easy - Explanation with examples - Russian Lessons

hey everybody welcome to this video about the Russian alphabet and this is the first video in a series of basic Russian lessons that I'm going to be making called Russian for Mom and I'm making them because I recently found out that my mother wants to learn Russian and when I found that out I thought you know what why not just teach her myself why not make some really basic really easy Russian lessons so that she'll have a little bit of an extra stimulus to go all the way and to really learn this language so that's what I'm doing here and I hope that some other people out there benefit from this just so you know who I am real quick my name is Kristen echoes I lived in Russia for ten years and I opened up a language school in Russia so we still have teachers who come over to Russia and teach English to Russians and so now on this YouTube channel I get to teach English speakers Russian and it's really a great experience I love Russia and I love going back over there as often as I can and so anybody who wants to know about how to get a job in Russia or you know how to travel to some different cities or how to experience some different things over there maybe anybody who wants to know how to open a business in Russia you can book a consultation with me through the link that's under this video so there should be a link down there you can click it but consultation and I'll share that information with you but let's jump right in and today's lesson is going to be about the Russian alphabet and any Russians who are watching I'm sure that you'll get a kick out of my own pronunciation because it's far from perfect but here's my interpretation for beginners of Russian okay so first we have this letter which looks very similar to English and it's pronounced ah so this is like the long a sound in English for example in the word car very similar ah next is but and this is very similar to English B now it doesn't look exactly like a B but it's not too hard to remember because you know it kind of looks like a B right sometimes it might also look like a six like the numbers say if you see it written in a different form now the next one looks like a capital B but it's not it's a V sound so this is the and we need to try to remember the difference between these two that we have bit that looks like a six and that that looks like a B all right so a lot of times when we're studying the letters and the sounds of the Russian alphabet it's confusing because we look at the men we compare them and we interpret them immediately as if they were English letters and we want to stop doing that we want to just remember that this is a different alphabet completely it's not the Latin alphabet like in English so it's a completely different alphabet and it's based on it's actually based on Greek but it's its own alphabet called Cyrillic and so we need to remember that these letters have their own sounds so we have aa bit V and the next one is again and so it looks like like a lowercase R but this is get you can kind of remember it like gun right looks kind of like a gun all right then the next one we have this it looks like I don't know an alien from one of those old you know video game or arcade games then you like shoot down yeah so uh or maybe you can think of it as a house maybe it looks like a small house let's think of it as a house that'll be easier for us to remember what it means this is the letter D this is dead and we can remember it for from the word for house which is doum doum means house and this is the first letter in the word dome so let's think of it as a little house next we have yeah I know it looks like the letter e in English but it doesn't make the sound II never okay this is the word yeah sorry this is the letter yeah so you might hear at the beginning of it there's this like Y sound like in English so it's yeah yeah right yeah there are two sounds to phonetic sounds that are here yeah yeah yeah okay next there's yo so again there's a Y sound at the beginning of it but then oh so we have yeah and yo the only difference between these two is that I mean in writing visually is that yo has two dots on the top and when we write it as a lowercase yeah or yo it's the same okay next we have this symbol that looks like an asterisk right or this letter that looks like an asterisk and this is Jay now we don't have this sound as a separate letter in English so up to this point it's been very it's been very easy right so we have AA which is like a in English so it's a very close equivalent then we have bit like be in English vet like V get like G den like D yeah which looks a lot like E but also sounds like ye right now we have yo which is again it looks like E but it has two dots on top and it's like why Oh yo yo yo then we have this letter so it doesn't really look like anything that we have in English and it doesn't really sound like any letter that we have in English but luckily we have this sound in English just not this letter so this is think of it like the sound in the word I sure like the color ah sure or maybe the continent Asia so there's a lot of different words or maybe maybe the color beige so all of these words in English have this sound even though we don't have a special letter for it so usually when we transcribe it to English will write it like Z H alright so I'm going to go ahead and start transcribing these letters grab another color for you I'll transcribe them which means I'm going to write the English letter equivalent now sometimes when we get to some of the letters that don't have a good equivalent I'll have to explain it to you and it won't make a lot of sense to have it written like this that's why I didn't do it at first but let's go back so we have AA which is like let's say aah aah right then we have been which is like B then we have n V get G then D yeah why e yo why o and Z H so imagine saying SH like Shh but instead a Z all right great okay now that brings us to the next row the next row starts with this it looks like the let it looks like the number 3 but it's the letter Z Z okay so this is a very easy equivalent to English this is our letter Z it's the same sound next it looks like a backwards in right it looks like a backwards in and this is a vowel sound this is e this is this long e sound okay so in English we would usually write a double e like this like EEE so this is e but then what's the next letter it looks the same right it's still a backwards in but it has this curved line on top this accented mark and that's because this is in Russian called e cut guy or short e and this is basically the equivalent to the English letter Y so it's just like Yi right so here we go it's just the letter Y but you know sometimes at the end of the word in English sometimes at the end of the word in English why can sound like e like in the word day that's not how it sounds this sounds more like the letter Y in the word yellow yellow all right so that's what this sounds like and you can see this letter at the beginning of a word for example the word yogurt in Russian yogurt it starts with this letter so it has that yeah sound next we have cot and it has the same it looks like okay it sounds like okay it is a K so it's all okay let's go to the next one so this one is the letter L the letter L however in English we have just the letter in the sound L look look at the end of this app at the end of this sound it's a it what in Russian is called a hard sound so it just is low but if you've ever studied a European language like Italian or French or Spanish they also have another sound for L which is Lydia right so it's a softer sound according to Russian so usually people are going to say that this is eighty to eighty but in English of course we say L [Music] alright so we have K L next this one looks like in it sounds like him it is M so this is M next is no in yeah so it looks like an H looks like an English H but it's actually an in the letter in nut and then we have all which is like the English oh now listen to the difference in Russian it's all in English it's O English has two sounds when we say this letter we have two sounds we say ah boo oh but in Russian it's just one sound it's just all alright great so that's the second row let's move to the third row next we have pup so this one you know it just looks like three lines it maybe it looks like the mathematical symbol for pi right which also comes from the Greek alphabet so this is PI and it's pi because it's the letter P so it's Pope there we go next well if this is the letter P then what's this it looks like P right it's R so this is this is Anna and in Russian you don't have to roll the R as much as some other languages like Spanish for example so it's just uh it's just a that's it you don't have to roll it really really long you know in Spanish there's two different bars so this would be like a single are in Spanish and the next it looks like a C but this is an S all right I mean it's not so difficult to remember because first of all C in English sometimes sounds like s and second of all because in the name of the country Murcia we have two of these so Russia written in Russian is Nicaea are o SS a yeah I'll write it up there later for you actually let's go ahead and do that ready so we have our o SS and yeah see ya all right next it looks like a T sounds like a T it is a T this is tip the next one it looks like the letter Y now this is confusing right because sometimes we already have a letter that corresponds to the English one and then oh there it is in Russian so we know that it can't be Y because that one already means Y right well why not well it's not yeah this one is actually ooh ooh so it's like the English letter U but it's not you ooh it's just ooh all right the English letter you can sometimes sound like ooh and sometimes sound like you write like if we say use or if we say youth or something like this then it has that yeah whoo Sam that's a different sound in Russian those are two different ones you might have already noticed that we had that we had oh and we had yo and those are two different letters all right so we'll get will talk a little bit more about that in another lesson right now we're just going through the sounds so and it looks this letter that looks like Y it's actually whoo next we have foot so this is f it looks like a circle with a line through it this is f next this letter looks like X in English but it's actually yeah like an H sound okay okay the next so this one looks like an upside down version of our P symbol the PI symbol right it looks like it's upside down and then it also has this tail and this again is a sound that we do have in English but we don't have a letter for it so this is so this is set TS together so think of the word pizza you have in the middle of this word pizza alright next in this letter it looks like the number four but this is like English ch this is chuh chuh alright great so now we are on our last row of letters and this letter right here it looks like a strange w this is like SH in English so we have but then if you look at the next letter it looks like that same weird W but with a tail on it and this is a sound that we don't have in English or we don't use it actually we we use both of these sounds but we don't really think that they're different at all so to an English speaker it's not going to sound like there's a difference but to a Russian speaker it's going to sound like there is so the first one was shut and the lot the second one is so this sound is either in the top or in the bottom part of your mouth and so you make it a little bit differently and in the transcription this second letter is usually written like see like shch okay something like this or I usually write it just SCH like some German words are written but many people in the International transcription they say it's shch so if you see words written like that in English then that's just corresponding to this letter all right okay so the rest of the letters that we have here can be a little bit difficult to remember first of all the next one is called to order these Mac which means hard sign so it doesn't have a sound that it makes on its own so I'm just gonna write this as the transcription I'm just gonna write hard sign okay the hard sign Jordi's Mac and what the hard sign does is it follows other letters it follows consonants and it makes them hard so if it follows a T it's going to be a hard T now we already have one example of hard and soft and we talked about L right and in English it's L and Russian it's aid because in Russian in English it's hard and in Russian it's soft so if we had this hard sign coming after the L sound then it would be L like in English but if we had the soft sign after it would be n like in Russian okay so the letter that we have here is a sound and the letter that we don't have in English so this is probably going to be one of the hardest sounds for you to learn and for the transcription we can just write why but it's not really like why so you know I'm not perfect at pronunciation either and the way that I pronounce this letter is ooh so it's kind of like an e sound but it's also like an e sound at the same time but in English when we say it it's in the top part of our mouth whereas this sound is somewhere in the back and in the bottom part of the mouth so you'll have to listen to Russian speakers say this and you'll get a lot of practice when you learn the pronouns because the words you or we or you all they all have this sound in them all right so that's ooh so you have to practice that one next we have the soft sign and just like the hard sign the soft sign does not make its own sound the soft sign just comes after other letters and changes their sound so we already had that example with L alright the last three letters that we have here are all vowel sounds so remember in the first row we had the letter and sound yeah but where is the sound just a right if here's yeah how do you say yeah well that's it this is like a so I'm just gonna write e H F the next is U so it's like y-you-you now remember this letter up here that looks like a Y in English is ooh and this one that looks like a line connected to a circle this is U and then the last one that looks like a backwards capital this is yeah yeah and this letter alone means I just like in English we have just one letter for I in Russian they do - it's just one letter yeah it means I like me alright great so those are the letters of the alphabet and those are the sounds that they make now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to circle the vowel sounds because there's something I want to show you about these vowel sounds I said I was going to do it in another lesson let's just do it here so we have ah we have yeah we have yo e oh oh yeah you yeah and let's change this so that they're all the same alright so what we should notice about these vowels and the sounds that they make is that you should notice that there are some that are just the sound and some of some of them that have this u sound at the beginning this Y sound so we have aa and we have yeah we have a and yeah we have oh and yo we have ooh and you and we have and we have this is also a vowel sound we have E and E all right so they come in these pairs there's one that doesn't have this Y sound at the beginning this you sound at the beginning and one that does okay let's look at them again we have ah yeah yeah Oh yo ooh you and those are the vowel sounds in Russian now of course we can go into a lot more depth and talk about how the sounds change how they're pronounced when they're put together how there's there are some exceptions and some rules but generally speaking in Russian words sound more phonetic than in English so the the basic pronunciation of the language is easier to understand than in English where we have some letters that aren't pronounced that are silent here or there so in Russian typically what you see is what you get the problem for English speakers learning Russian is that there's a lot of consonants together and a lot of sounds together that you wouldn't you you wouldn't normally say in English so so yeah I hope that that helped you and that's pretty much it for our pronunciation lesson our alphabet lesson here so this is the first lesson that I'm shooting for my mom for her to start learning Russian and to learn the Russian alphabet how to pronounce things and mom you're gonna have to review these sounds and you're going to have to memorize them because sometimes it can be really confusing right I mean this one it's not B it's V mom it's V you have to remember okay so I hope that helps you mom and anyone else who is learning Russian and right here at the beginning when you're just learning the sounds and the alphabet the letters it's a really important thing for you to do especially if you're planning to go to Russia so that you can read street signs I mean everybody who comes over to Russia I tell them you have to learn the alphabet before you come it's definitely something you want to learn because you know there might be a sign that says a coffee shop and it says it in English but it's written in Russian letters it just says Kofi soap and if you can read the letters you'll understand that it's coffee shop and there's a lot of different situations like this where and this word will be written with Russian letters and all you have to do is learn the alphabet so I hope this lesson helped you I hope that you're able to remember the letters I hope that you'll come back and review this when you forget them and in my in my experience the best way to really learn them is to force yourself to look at some new words and texts and just you know go online and start looking up places where you can see some different Russian words and try to pronounce them practice pronouncing them and then go back and check if you got the letters and the pronunciation of the letters right okay so again if you are interested in going to Russia just to travel over there as a tourist or to do a language program to learn Russian or if you're interested in going over there to work or if you want to start a business in Russia or you know anything that you want to do in Russia feel free to book a consultation with me there's a link under this video and I'd be happy to help you out with that I've spent 10 years and I go back to Russia every year sometimes twice a year or more and I'd be happy to help you with it and who knows maybe we'll even see each other over there so thanks a lot for watching this feel free to leave a comment down below let me know what you think I'm sure some Russian people will tell me how my pronunciation was terrible or how they're surprised that I can remember the letters or something like that you know I'm sure that there are some people who are gonna watch this and say that I got it all wrong you know whatever let them do it but feel free to to press like to share this video with your friends or with someone else and to have a good laugh okay don't forget to subscribe to this channel too because I'm going to be posting even more of these Russian lessons that I'm making for my mom and for other people and you'll even see some other interesting stuff on this channel a little bit later and you might even get an offer from me to study Russian or to join one of our programs so thanks a lot for watching that's it for this first lesson of Russian for Mom and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Rush Into Russian

Views: 818,242

Keywords: russian alphabet, learn russian alphabet, russian lessons, russian lessons alphabet, russian alphabet made easy, russian alphabet pronunciation, russian basics, russian basic words, russian sounds, russian for beginners, russian for beginners alphabet, russian for beginners audio, russian grammar, russian grammar lessons, alphabet in russian, alphabet in russian translate, russian language conversation for beginners, beginner russian, kris amerikos, kris amerikos russian

Id: 7zoRACKn_7M

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2019