Learn the Russian & Cyrillic Alphabet Free
The no-nonsense way to learn Cyrillic. Pick letters, practice sounds, track progress.
Select Characters to Study
Click a group to select it for practice. Selected groups highlight in red. New to Cyrillic? Start with our interactive alphabet chart!
What Cyrillic actually is
Cyrillic is the writing system used by Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Belarusian, and dozens of other languages, around 250 million people write with it every day. Russian uses 33 letters. English uses 26. That gap is smaller than it looks, and it is not the hard part.
The hard part is that Cyrillic and Latin share ancestors, so some letters look identical to English letters and sound completely different. В is a V. Н is an N. Р is an R. Your brain sees a familiar shape and reaches for the wrong sound. Learning Cyrillic is less about memorizing 33 new symbols than about retraining the handful of instincts that fight you.
How to use this tool
Pick a group of letters above and press Begin Learning. You will see a character, type what it sounds like, and get instant feedback. Wrong answers show you the correct answer and keep going. No account, no timer, and no daily streak to keep alive.
Start with the vowels. There are ten of them and they anchor everything else, because most Russian words are readable once you can sound out the vowels and a few common consonants. Then add consonants in small batches rather than all twenty-one at once. If a particular letter keeps catching you, select just that group and drill it until it stops.
Two settings worth knowing about. Auto-Submit moves you forward the moment your answer is right, which makes practice faster once you are confident. Repeat Problem Questions brings back the letters you miss more often, which is the single most useful setting for getting past the letters that refuse to stick.
What to expect
Most people can recognize the easy letters within a day. The false friends, the ones that look like English but are not, take about a week of daily practice before the wrong instinct stops firing. After two weeks of a few minutes a day, most learners can sound out Russian words on signs and menus, slowly but correctly.
You will not understand what you are reading yet. That is fine and expected. Reading comes first, meaning comes later. Words that sound like their English counterparts make good early practice: ресторан, интернет, кофе, такси. You can sound those out today.
Where to go next
Every letter on this site plays a real recording, not a synthesized voice, so you are learning how Russian actually sounds rather than guessing from a transliteration. If you want the full reference with audio, the alphabet chart has all 33 letters with example words and a printable version. If you keep confusing specific letters, the false friends guide covers the six worst offenders. And if you need to type or paste Cyrillic characters somewhere, the copy and paste tool handles that in one click.
New to Cyrillic? Quick starts