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Lesson Transcript

Zdrastvuite, Ya Svetlana! Welcome to Russianpod101.com’s Алфавит Made Easy!
The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn the Russian Cyrillic alphabet: the Алфавит!
In the last lesson we introduced some more Strangers, the most challenging letters of the Russian alphabet. We learned “Й” and “Ц”. Have you been reviewing how to read and write them? I hope you're ready to move on!
In this lesson we’ll learn two more “Strangers” and some more sentences for your notebook!
The first Stranger this time is “Ы”, which is a letter that may be hard to pronounce! It looks like a lowercase Bee and El next to each other, but be careful to recognize that it is a single letter. The sound it makes is “ee”; There is no similar sound in English. Interestingly, there is no uppercase “Ы”, because it is never at the beginning of a word.
Here’s the uppercase.
Ы (print, upper)
And the lowercase.
Ы (print, lower)
Now that we've seen the print version of “Ы”, let's take a look at how to write it by hand.
The cursive version of “Ы” looks like this. As you can see, it's a single, smooth stroke. While it looks a little complicated, it's actually quite natural to write, and it shouldn’t be much of a challenge.
Now let’s write it.
Ы (cursive, lower)
The second letter we'll learn in this lesson looks kind of like the ship from Star Trek: Ю. While it may look strange, “Ю” has a pretty familiar sound. “Ю” makes a combination vowel sound just like the word “you”. In printed form, size is the only difference between the upper and lowercase versions.
Here’s how to write the printed versions.
Ю (print, upper)
And the lowercase.
Ю (print, lower)
Now let's see how to write “Ю” by hand It's written with two strokes. The lowercase looks similar except for size. Many people write it using a single stroke. As you can see, this is more efficient!
Ю (cursive, upper)
And the lowercase.
Ю (cursive, lower)
Great job! Now let's take what we’ve learned so far and look at some examples that we can write!
First up is a fact about a famous Russian – try reading it aloud.
[short pause] Here is how it should sound: “Юрий Гагарин был первым космонавтом.”
Did you recognize the name Yuri Gagarin? Well, if so, then maybe you can guess what it means: “Yuri Gagarin was the first cosmonaut.”
Let's look at each word in the sentence: “Юрий Гагарин” means “Yuri Gagarin”. “был” means “was” and “первым космонавтом” means “the first cosmonaut.” That wasn't too bad was it? Now let’s write it by hand, using the fun-to-write uppercase “Ю”!
Юрий Гагарин был первым космонавтом. (cursive)
Now let's look at a another sentence that you will probably use a lot as a beginner. Try saying the sentence out loud. [short pause] “Я не понимаю.” Did you get it right? The first two words might be familiar: “Я” means “I” and “не” in this case means “don't.” The last word is new, but very important. “понимаю” means “understand.” "I don't understand"
Я не понимаю. (cursive)
That’s it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll introduce a few more Strangers. See you in the next Алфавит Made Easy lesson!
Пока Пока

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