The Alphabet: Russian Vowels
So far, we have dealt with the letters common for both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Before getting to letters which are different from Latin, we’ll take a step aside and look exclusively at the vowels. We need to learn them sooner rather than later because no words in Russian can be formed without them.
А-Я |
О-Ё |
Э-Е |
У-Ю |
Ы-И |
---|---|---|---|---|
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
aa ja |
o jo |
e je |
u ju |
i ee |
There are 10 vowels in Russian, which can be neatly divided into 2 groups of 5. Click on the letter!
The upper and lower vowels form natural couplets: Each of the lower vowels (except for the last "И" ) begins with a ‘j-slide’ and is a kind of ‘diphthong reflection’ of its upper counterpart. If you sing or drawl a lower vowel (except "И"), you wil end up singing its corresponding vowel above.
Notice the "y-slide" quality of four vowels above -- Я, Ё, Ю, Е:
Я | - |
y-А-А-А... | |
Ё | - |
y-О-О-О... | |
Ю | - |
y-У-У-У... | |
Е | - |
y-Э-Э-Э... |
This division of all vowels into couplets is very important for good pronunciation, spelling, and some grammar choices (as you will see later).
Any of the upper level vowels makes a preceding consonant sound hard; any of the lower level vowels makes it sound soft.
Consonants can also be softened by the soft sign - "Ь" -- (we'll deal with it at the end of Chapter 1 in Lesson 7).
It's worth knowing that:
- The vowel ë is always stressed and for that reason you will never see a stress mark above it.
- There are no words beginning with the vowel Ы.
Meaningful vowels:
Я |
I |
a personal pronoun which is never capitalized in Russian unless it begins a sentence |
И |
and |
a conjunction |
А |
and, but |
a conjunction which usually expresses some degree of contrasting (can also be used at the beginning of a sentence to make it easier to start the phrase) |
О |
about |
a preposition |
У |
at, by, etc |
a preposition |