Learning My Ah, Beh, Vuh's

As I was told that many of the merchants in Moldova lived under the Soviet regime, and they tend to list pricing and count change in Russian, I am working on my basic Russian with an emphasis on numbers. Here's one through four in Russian: Один, два, три, четыре ...

It ends up that the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet is very phonetic, as long as you know what sound each character makes. So, I took a step back today and began the process of learning just that: the sound of each character. I made my flash cards and was beginning to relate each character with a sound. However, some of the characters sound very close to each other. My friend Kelvin knows Russian, so I brought him my flash cards for his help in differentiating the sounds. Not only did he tell me that I didn't have the sound right for several of the characters, but he also informed me that I would never print out the characters. Rather, I would need to learn each of the characters in cursive for writing sake.

This chart shows both the print version and the cursive version of each letter.

So now, I have to learn essentially two separate visual alphabets. I am really beginning to empathize with people learning to read in English, especially if they come from a culture with a different alphabet. Thinking about all the variations of handwriting that my students would turn in when I taught English at KU, I can only imagine that I will run into as many variations on the Cyrillic cursive. In fact, I feel like a child again -- contemplating the mysterious code of cursive writing that adults would use. Even in my own family, Mom's cursive was (and is) flowery and flowing, well-rounded and bold - that of a designer and artist. Dad's, on the other hand, is that of an engineer -- staccato and barely legible. We would often have teachers questioning the legitimacy of permission slips if Dad got involved.

Good thing I find this so fascinating! I strongly recommend this learning process to anyone desiring to give one's neurons a good athletic stretching. I may be imagining it, but I really feel like my brain is getting a workout.
But wait, there's more. See that third set of characters in the chart above? The character that looks like our "B"? That is a Cyrillic "V" sound. The "H" looking character in the fourth row sounds like our "N", and the backward "N" looking character in the third row is our long "E" sound, while the lower case cursive looking "m" is our "T" sound. The "X" looking character in the sixth row is our "H" sound, and you begin to see how my brain is getting mixed messages. This goes on for most of the characters.

And... some of the characters don't have any sound at all, but when combined with other characters, change the sound that the original characters make.

I have about a month to practice before we go to staging the first of June. Crikey! Where is the time flying?

By the way, my name in Cyrillic print is roughly -- Тим and sounds like "Team". (Luckily, my names sounds exactly the same in Romanian, and I shall now turn attentively for the next 27 months to anyone discussing team building, team sports, or anything relating to "team" in English).  

At least two of the characters of my name are familiar in print. I can't say the same with the cursive: