Fiona McPherson - Easy Russian Alphabet: A Visual Workbook

Published 2018 by Wayz Press, Wellington, New Zealand.

Copyright 2018 by Fiona McPherson.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Wayz Press, a subsidiary of Capital Research Limited.

ISBN 978-1-927166-54-3

To report errors, please email errata@wayz.co.nz

For additional resources andup-to-date information about any errors, go to the Mempowered website at www.mempowered.com

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The Memory Key

How do we learn? Learning happens through two fundamental processes: connection, and repetition.

We always need repetition, but the amount of repetition needed varies a great deal. If we can make connections to information already well known to us, then that new information will be more easily remembered meaning that it needs less repetition. For example, if your cousin has a new baby and names it Geraldine a family name, the name of your aunt and great-aunt and great-grandmother you will remember this much more easily than you would a less relevant name, chosen simply because the parents liked the sound of it.

When we learn meaningful topics, such as how genetic transmission occurs, or how black holes are formed, connections are made and strengthened in a way that reflects your growing understanding of the subject. When we learn something that is less rooted in meaning, such as vocabulary in a new language, reducing the amount of repetition required often depends on creating new, arbitrary connections.

The point of mnemonics (acronyms, images, silly stories) is to make arbitrary connections more memorable.

This book uses several strategies of proven effectiveness, in order to reduce the amount of repetition you need to learn the letters of the Russian alphabet. These strategies include grouping, mnemonic images, and opportunities for varied retrieval practice.

The standard way to learn an alphabet is as a list of letters in alphabetical order. But a more effective way is to break it down into useful groups. I have broken down the Russian alphabet into groups based on how difficult the letters are to learn, for native users of the Roman alphabet (which is the one used by English speakers). Doing it this way not only enables you to more quickly master the bulk of the letters, it also explicitly tells you which letters need to be practiced more.

Were going to start with the easiest group those which are just the same in both alphabets.

You may wonder why its necessary to spend any time at all on these letters, which obviously you already know. There are two reasons. The first, and most important, is that there are some letters that are false friends that is, they look just like English letters, but they correspond to different sounds. It is not enough, therefore, to simply recognize the letters as the ones youre used to; you need to know that these are indeed the same letters youre familiar with. (Note that from now on I will use the word English as a more user-friendly term for the Roman alphabet, given that this book is written in the English language.)

The second reason is that recognizing some letters is only good for the situation where youre reading the language. To write in it, you need to go further than recognition; you need to be able to produce the right letters. This means you need to know which letters represent which sounds.

The foundation of your learning is the visual images Ive constructed for each letter. Notice that each card shows, first, the upper and lower case forms of the Russian letter, written in a color picked out from the picture. Below these is the English letter that is translated as its equivalent. Below that is a word, in English, showing how that letter is pronounced. The part of the word that is the appropriate sound is written using the Russian letter. A picture showing the meaning of the word is then shown not because the word is anything other than simple! but because images are generally much more memorable than words.

The key to learning the alphabet is to build a strong link between the image and the Russian letter. Ill talk more about this as we go. For now, lets have a look at the first group. This will give you the opportunity to see the strategy at work.

These 5 letters are almost the same in the Russian alphabet as they are in ours, so they are the easiest to learn. The one exception is the K, but it is identical in shape to an English letter, and its transliteration (the letter its translated into) matches an English letter that sometimes bears the same sound. The English c is (confusingly) sometimes soft (s) and sometimes hard (k). In Russian, then, the K is a hard c.

While the visual images are less important as memory aids for these easy letters, they do serve as reminders of pronunciation, particularly in the case of the K and the two vowels. The car for A reminds us that it is pronounced with a long a sound, as in car and father. The pot for O reminds us that its pronounced with a short o sound, as in pot.

While the images for T and M may seem unnecessary, they will help you remember that these letters are exactly what they seem. Later we will learn several letters that are, on the contrary, not at all the familiar letters they appear to be.

The take-away from these first five cards, then, is that

• these are the 5 letters that are the same in both alphabets
• K = (hard) c, as in cat
• A is long, as in car
• O is short, as in pot.

To remember which letters are the same in both languages, use the mnemonic: ATOM K (This is particularly appropriate, because ATOM is the same word in Russian.)

A very small set! This is really an appendix to group 1. These two letters are also relatively easy, with the first one in particular being almost one of the easy set: the letter for b is easily recognized as such, although not identical with ours. It is also pronounced in a similar way.