Cyrillic Alphabet to English: The Full Transliteration Guide

You found a Russian word and you just want to know what it says in plain English letters. Or maybe it is the other way around: you want to write your own name in Cyrillic so a friend in Moscow can read it. Either way, what you need is not a memory trick. You need a clean conversion chart. This is that reference: the full Cyrillic alphabet to English, mapped letter by letter, with the sound each one makes and the handful of letters that love to fool you.

Let me be clear about what this guide is and is not, because it saves you time. This is the transliteration reference, the lookup table you keep open in a tab. If your goal is to actually memorize the alphabet and read fluently without checking a chart every time, that is a different job, and I wrote a separate piece on how to learn to read it with visual mnemonics. Use this page to convert. Use that one to remember.

The full transliteration table

Russian has 33 letters. Here is every single one, with the English transliteration most systems use and the sound it makes. Skim it once, then bookmark it.

That is the whole alphabet. Now let me sort it into three buckets so it stops feeling like a wall of symbols. Once you see which letters are safe, which are sneaky, and which are genuinely new, the table gets a lot smaller in your head.

Look-alikes that also sound similar

These are the gifts. They look like a Latin letter and they make the sound you expect, so you can read them on day one with zero effort.

А is "a", К is "k", М is "m", О is "o", and Т is "t". Put them together and you can already decode кот (kot, "cat") and мама (mama, "mom") without thinking. The letter Е mostly fits here too: it looks like an E and often sounds close to one, though at the start of a word or after a vowel it carries a "y" glide and becomes "ye", which is why you will see it transliterated both ways.

Tip: Start every reading session with these five anchor letters. When a long word intimidates you, find the look-alikes first, lock them in, and the unknown letters between them suddenly have fewer places to hide.

False friends: they look English but sound different

This is the bucket that trips everyone, so slow down here. Each of these letters wears a Latin costume and makes a completely different sound underneath.

В looks like a B but it is "v", as in Москва (Moskva, "Moscow"). Н looks like an H but it is "n". Р looks like a P but it is a rolled "r". С looks like a C but it is "s". У looks like a Y but it is "oo". Х looks like an X but it is "kh", that throaty sound in the Scottish loch. And the famous one: Я looks like a backwards R, yet it is "ya", the sound at the start of "yard". If you remember nothing else from this section, remember that Я is never an R.

The trap with false friends is that your eyes are faster than your training. Your brain reads the shape and blurts the English sound before you can stop it. The cure is repetition on real words, not on the bare letters. Sounding out actual syllables is the fastest fix, which is exactly why I built a drill around the top 100 Russian syllables that pairs these tricky letters with vowels until the right sound becomes automatic.

Brand-new shapes you have to learn fresh

The rest of the alphabet has no English look-alike, which is oddly good news: with nothing familiar to unlearn, your brain just files them as new. This group is Б, Г, Д, Ж, З, И, Й, Л, П, Ф, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь, Э, Ю.

A few are worth a quick note. Ж is "zh", the soft buzz in "measure". Щ is "shch", a longer, softer cousin of Ш ("sh"). The two signs, Ъ (hard sign) and Ь (soft sign), make no sound of their own; they only adjust the consonant before them, so in transliteration they often vanish or become an apostrophe. And Ы is the one English mouths fight hardest, a deep "i" with the tongue pulled back. You will master these much faster in handwriting than in print, because writing forces your hand to learn each shape, which is the whole case for learning Russian cursive handwriting early.

The reverse direction: writing English in Russian letters

Now flip it. To write an English name or word in Cyrillic, you do not translate it; you respell it phonetically with the Russian letters that match the sounds. This is what people are really after when they search for the English alphabet in Russian letters: a way to make their name readable to a Russian speaker.

Here are a few worked examples:

The snags are the English sounds Cyrillic has no single letter for. There is no native "j", so English "j" becomes Дж (a "d" plus "zh"), which is how John turns into Джон. There is no true "h" either, so depending on the name you borrow Х (the "kh" sound) or Г (a hard "g"), which is why Harry can appear as Гарри. And there is no "w", so you reach for В (v) or У (oo) depending on how the word sounds. Once you accept that you are spelling sounds and not letters, writing English names in Cyrillic stops being guesswork.

This phonetic respelling is also the key to reading borrowed words and brand names you already know, and it pays off the moment you start on real vocabulary like common Russian greetings, where the alphabet finally becomes words you can actually say.

If you want a person checking your sounds instead of a chart, that is exactly what my 1-on-1 Russian lessons are for: we read your name, your city, and real Russian text together until the conversion happens without thinking.

Try this today

1. Write your own first name in Cyrillic using the reverse-direction rules above, then check each letter against the transliteration table.
2. Copy out the five look-alike letters (А, К, М, О, Т) and read кот and мама aloud three times each.
3. Drill the false friends by writing the Cyrillic for "Moscow" (Москва) and saying every sound slowly, especially the В as "v".
4. Pick one English name of a friend and respell it in Cyrillic, then send it to them as a message.
5. Take one short Russian word you find online, transliterate it to English letters with the table, and say it out loud before you look up the meaning.