The Russian alphabet uses letters from the Cyrillic script. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters, 10 vowels, 21 consonants and 2 signs.

There are 10 vowels in the Russian alphabet.

There are 21 consonants in the Russian alphabet. Most of the consonants have two sounds, a hard one and a soft one. The hard/soft quality can be distinguished by the letter that follows it.

If the consonant is followed by one of “а, о, у, э, ы”, it produces the hard sound.

If the consonant is followed by one of “я, ё, ю, е, и, ь”, it produces the soft sound.

Here are the hard-soft pairs:

These consonants only have the hard sound:

These consonants only have the soft sound:

The signs “ь, ъ” are never pronounced. In addition to marking the hard/soft quality of a consonant, they can also separate the sound of a succeeding vowel from the preceding consonant. For example:

In a word with more than one syllable, the word stress is the syllable that is pronounced stronger than the others. The stress of Russian words does not follow a particular pattern. The unstressed vowels in a multi-syllabic word may have a slightly different pronunciation, for example “o” in the English word “official” is not a full /o/, but /ə/. This is called the vowel reduction.

① ¢Ù When “а, o” are in the syllable right before the stress or in the unstressed opening syllable, they are pronounced more weakly, like /ʌ/ .

② When “а, о” are not in the stressed syllable or in the above case, they are pronounced as /ə/:

① When “е, я” are in the syllable right before the stress or in the unstressed opening syllable, they are pronounced more weakly, like /и/:

② When “е, я” are not in the stressed syllable or in the above case, they are pronounced as /jə/:

The following consonant-vowel combinations have fixed pronunciations: