Russian language

Here are some useful phrases in English and their pronunciation in Russian language:

Russian alphabet

The Russian alphabet is known as the Cyrillic alphabet. There are 33 letters in the Russian alphabet. 11 Vowels, 20 consonants and 2 pronunciation signs. What is great thing about Russian language is that almost all words can be sounded out as they are written. Unlike English where the pronunciation of a word may not be clear from it’s written form. Russian also has one letter to one sound, unlike English where two letter often make one sound.

Russian language is the most popular language of Eurasia and the most mostly spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian is an Eastern Slavonic language closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian with about 277 million speakers mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is also spoken in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonian, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Finland, Mongolia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Israel, Afghanistan, the USA, Canada and a number of countries. Russian is the 7th most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers and the 4th by total number of speakers. In Russia, Cyrillic was first written in the early Middle Ages in clear-cut, legible ustav (large letters). Later a succession of cursive forms developed.

In the early eighteenth century, under Peter the Great, the forms of letters were simplified and regularized, with some appropriate only to Greek being removed. Further unnecessary letters were expunged in 1918, leaving the alphabet as it is today. Russian language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The earliest known writing in Russia dates from the 10th century and was found at Novgorod. The main languages written on them in an early version of the Cyrillic alphabet were Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic. There are also some texts in Finnish, Latin and Greek. Russian started appearing in writing regularly during the reign of Peter the Great (a.k.a. Peter I) (1672-1725) who introduced a revised alphabet and encouraged authors to use a literary style closer to their spoken language. The dialect of Moscow was used as the basis for written Russian. Russian literature started to flower during the 19th century when Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Pushkin were active.

During the Soviet era knowledge of the Russian language was wide spread though the subjects authors could write about were restricted. Much of what we know about the origins of the Russian language is rooted in the efforts of historians and linguists to delve into the mystery of the past. Sometime around 3500 to 2500 BC the people who spoke the language known as Indo-European began gradually to form dialect communities and separate from each other.

The principles of word-formation, literary style, and, to some extent, inflexions and basic vocabulary, of Russian have been influenced by Church Slavonic, a developed and partly adopted form of the South Slavic Old Church Slavonic language used by the Russian Orthodox Church. As the Indo-European tribes moved "to the West and to the East . . . the Slavic tribes became separated from the mass of other tribes and developed their own language, which is called Common-Slavonic or Proto-Slavonic" (Sokolsky 19). These tribes settled in the heart of present-day eastern Europe and continued to use mutually intelligible dialectal forms for centuries.

Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary, a large number of dialects exists in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of the Russian language into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern," with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern, Central and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region. Dialectology within Russia recognizes dozens of smaller-scale variants.

So you are here to learn Russian! The first step to learning Russian is to learn the Russian alphabet. It may seem daunting to learn a new alphabet, but it is relatively easy. In fact, the great thing about Russian is that almost all words can be sounded out as they are written. Unlike English where the pronunciation of a word may not be clear from its written form. Russian also has one letter to one sound, unlike English where two letters often make one sound.