Basics
of
East Slavic
Cyrillic
Introduction & part 1
Hello! My pseudonym is Marii
̯
ka Nguy
ễ
n.
I joined Mastodon.social after I left the other
social media website - Trust Cafe. On Trust
Cafe, 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:
А О І М К Т Е
A
is for vowels like "u" in "c
u
t" or "a" in "
a
rm".
O
is what you have in "
o
ff" and "d
aw
n".
I
is like the vowel in "s
ee
d" and "m
ee
t".
M
: "
m
other", "
m
an"
K
: "ro
ck
", "
c
alendar"
T
: "
t
ime", "ca
t
"
In Ukrainian and Rusyn (but not in Russian
and Belarusian), "
Е
"
is similar to Latin "E":
it's the sound as in "n
e
ck", "g
e
t".