Russian is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world: approximately 270 million speak it worldwide, with just over 140 million living in the Russian Federation.

Russian is a Slavonic language which belongs to the same Indo-European family as English. It has been influenced by a range of languages, including Old Church Slavonic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet (named after the ninth-century monk St Cyril, its reputed creator); the Cyrillic alphabet has 33 letters.

Can you learn Russian without learning the Cyrillic alphabet? Only at the very basic level of being able to understand a few spoken words. To use the language to any extent at all (even just to recognize street signs), you need to know the alphabet.

Is the alphabet difficult to learn? It certainly needs practice, but it is not completely different from English. Some letters look and sound like their English equivalents: the letters T, A and M , for example, spell the word ???, which means there . Some letters look familiar to the English speaker, but they sound different: e.g. E is pronounced like ‘ye’ in the word yet , P like ‘r’ in rat (though rolled), so ????? , which means theatre , is pronounced tyeatr. A third group of letters do not look like English letters; some are connected with Greek, such as? (which sounds like ‘f’ in far ), and others cannot be rendered by one English letter – ? is pronounced ‘sh’ – and the word ???? means scarf .

This course concentrates on the printed alphabet, but also gives you the opportunity to practise the handwritten version.

Pronunciation in Russian is straightforward: if you pronounce each letter individually, you will produce the whole word, i.e. the spelling represents the sound, which is not always the case in English (think of draft and draught , for example).

Learning the alphabet is your first step on the road to acquaintance with Russia, its language and culture.