Cyrillic Letters English Speakers Get Wrong

The tricky Cyrillic letters are not the strange-looking ones. The letters that trip up English speakers are the ones that look exactly like letters you already know and stand for a completely different sound. A shape you have never seen makes you slow down; a familiar shape makes you confident, and confidently wrong. You can always check yourself against a romanized form when you generate a name in both scripts.

These lookalikes are called false friends, and Russian names are full of them. Learn to distrust six letters in particular and a whole layer of confusion falls away. Then we will deal with the genuinely new shapes and the three letters that are not sounds in the way you expect.

The false friends, one at a time

Each letter below wears the face of a Latin letter. Under it is a real name that goes wrong the moment you read the letter as English.

В is v, not b. The name Виктор is Viktor. Read that first letter as a Latin B and you get “Biktor,” a name that does not exist.

Н is n, not h. Нина is Nina. Treat both Н shapes as English H and you get “Hiha,” which is nobody.

Р is r, not p. Роман is Roman. Read the Р as a Latin P and the name collapses into “Poman.”

С is s, not c. Соня is Sonya. The С is always an s sound, never the hard k that a Latin C can suggest.

У is u, not y. In Шура, Shura, the у is the oo in boot. Read it as a Latin Y and you land on “Shyra.”

Х is kh, not x. Михаил is Mikhail, with a raspy sound in the middle like the end of Bach. It is never the “ks” of a Latin X.

Why these tricky Cyrillic letters exist

There is a real reason these letters overlap, and it is not a coincidence or a trick. Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet are cousins. Both grew out of the Greek alphabet, as the history of the Cyrillic script records, and each inherited some Greek letters with their original Greek sound values.

That shared ancestry is exactly what creates the traps. В comes from the Greek letter that sounded like a v, and it kept that sound; the Latin B took the same shape for a different sound. Р is Greek rho, an r; Н traces to a Greek letter used for a different sound than Latin H; С is a rounded form of Greek sigma, an s. The shapes match because the ancestor is shared. The sounds differ because Latin and Cyrillic each made their own choices along the way.

Knowing this does not change how you read a name, but it helps the letters stick. You are not fighting a random code. You are reading a cousin of your own alphabet that kept a few of the family’s older habits.

The letters with no English shape

The second group looks foreign, which is honestly a mercy: an unfamiliar shape does not tempt you to guess. Each stands for a sound English writes with a cluster of letters.

Ж is the zh in measure. Ц is the ts in cats. Ч is the ch in church. Ш is the sh in shop. And Щ is a longer, softer version of that last one.

That final pair is the one that trips everyone, because Ш and Щ differ by a single tiny tail. Щ is just Ш with a hook added at the bottom right, and that hook changes the sound from a plain sh to a drawn-out shch, like the middle of fresh cheese. Compare Маша, Masha, with Щукин, Shchukin. One tail is the whole difference.

A quick way to keep them apart: the letter with the extra tail gets the extra letters in English. Plain ш is a plain sh; tailed щ is the longer shch. If you can see the hook, reach for the longer spelling.

The three that are not the sounds you expect

The last group is the strangest, and the soft sign deserves real attention because it is quietly everywhere in names.

The soft sign ь makes no sound at all. Its job is to soften the consonant just before it, a small change your ear may barely catch, and in almost every romanization it simply vanishes. That is why Ольга is written Olga and Игорь is written Igor, with no trace of the ь that sits inside each one. A stricter system marks it with an apostrophe, giving Olʹga, but you will rarely see that outside a library catalogue.

The hard sign ъ is its rare cousin. It also makes no sound; it keeps the consonant before it hard instead of soft. It almost never appears in names, and when it does, it is usually dropped in romanization.

The vowel ы is a genuine sound, just not one English has. Make the ee in see, then pull your tongue back and down, and you are close. It never starts a word, so you meet it inside surnames like Крылов, Krylov, and Черных, Chernykh, where it is written as a plain y.

That plain y is quietly deceptive. It gives an English reader no hint that the sound underneath is one they have never made, so Крылов looks like an ordinary Krylov on the page while hiding its strangest letter. It is the opposite problem to the false friends: there the shape lies about a familiar sound, and here a familiar letter hides an unfamiliar one. Both come back to the same rule, which is to trust the Cyrillic letter rather than the Latin one it was flattened into.

Why Fyodor and Fedor are the same name

One more letter causes a specific, common confusion. The letter ё always sounds like yo and is always stressed. But in everyday Russian print, the two dots on top are usually left off, so ё is written as a plain е.

That single habit explains a spelling you have surely seen twice. The name Фёдор becomes Fyodor when the ё is spelled out by sound, and Fedor when the dots are dropped and a foreigner reads the bare е plainly. Same name, two spellings, one missing pair of dots. It is also why systems disagree on names with ё, a thread picked up in why one name has several spellings.

A name that goes badly wrong

Here is what happens when the false friends gang up. The surname Воронов is stuffed with them: two в’s that look like B, an р that looks like P, and an н that looks like H. Read letter by letter as English, it turns into gibberish.

Read as English, Воронов says “BoPoHoB.” Read correctly, it is Voronov, a perfectly ordinary surname. Every error in that misreading is a false friend.

The letters that look like numbers

A last small group trips people in a different way: two Cyrillic letters look less like English letters and more like digits. Once you have seen them, they are easy, but the first encounter is jarring.

З is a z, and in some fonts it is almost indistinguishable from the number 3. Ч is the ch sound, and it can read like a mirror of the number 4. Neither is a number, of course. In a name like Зоя (Zoya) or Чехов (Chekhov), they are ordinary letters doing ordinary jobs. The lesson is the same one that runs through every tricky letter here: read by the sound the letter carries, not by the shape it borrows.

Try reading these

Put it to the test. Each name below is built to trip a reader who forgets the false friends. Read each one aloud, then check yourself.

1. Нора
2. Вера
3. Сорин

Answers: Nora (that Н is n, not h), Vera (the В is v, not b), and Sorin (an s and an r, not a c and a p). If you read all three without stumbling, the false friends have stopped fooling you.

The five letters worth memorising first

You do not need to master all 33 letters to stop misreading names. Learn these five false friends before anything else, and the most common mistakes disappear:

• В is v
• Н is n
• Р is r
• С is s
• У is u

Once those five are automatic, come back for the full alphabet in the Cyrillic alphabet for names, or go the other way and write your own name in Russian.

Common questions

Trust the sound, not the shape, and the letters that used to fool you become the ones you read fastest.