My kingdom for a secret decoder ring! The Cyrillic Alphabet
АБВГДЕФЛЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУХЧХЦШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ
абвгдежзийклнопртуфхцчшщъыьэюя
Reading Cyrillic is a bit like playing the memory card game from childhood, except instead of remembering which card is the red shovel you overturned 3 moves ago, you have to remember which letter you're reading
- looks like and stands for the same as the corresponding Roman alphabet character (A, M)
- looks like a Roman alphabet letter but stands for another one (B = V, H = N)
- stands for another letter of the alphabet but is actually a number (3 = Z, б =B)
- looks like a Roman alphabet letter but is actually a sound made by pressing teeth and tongue together to make a sound in a throat-clearing manner (Х = kha, Ш = sha)
- resembles a Greek letter (П = P, Ф = F)
- is backwards and/or looks like something I doodled in bank meetings (Я= ya, И = eee, Ж = zhe)
SO, when trying to navigate one's way around Russia it becomes a game of double-translation - first the Cyrillic to a Roman alphabet equivalent, whereby you can sound out the Russian word, and then from the Russian word to the equivalent English one.
To read an average-length word, mentally it goes a little something like:
"Right, ok, backwards 7 is G,
A ...is that actually A or is it another letter?...no, it's A, Pi which equals P,
...wait no, that's more like a lambda so that's an L,
backwards N with squiggle which is an 'eeee' sound, kinda,
C which is actually S, K which is K, backwards R which equals the sound 'ya',
3 which is...er...right...the Z-sound. So to sound it out that is
...wait what was the backwards N-squiggle again?"
You can see how this might be a long and tedious process.
A fast food menu in St Petersburg. At this point I'm not even sure if I'm in the sweet or savoury section. The first few days in Russia I hadn't figured out anything beyond C = S and P = R and relied on the English menus in the restaurants (which were interesting in and of itself, given I had fried under oppression with greens in plum sauce night 1 - Ringlish for 'quail' evidently).
Either that, or take the chances of getting beef tongue in aspic by playing Russian menu lucky dip "uhhhh...I'll have the 3rd one down I guess."
However, by the end of week 1 I had a few letters down and was starting to be able to sound out words in the manner one would see Bert & Ernie perform on Sesame Street, e.g.
"Kuh …......At"
"Kuh....At"
"Kuhhaaattttt"
"Kuhat"
"Cat!"
Approaching one of the many short stops on the train between Moscow ("MOCKBA") and Irkutsk ("ИPKУTCK") I decided to test my improved Cyrillic reading capabilities and sound out the name of the station:
ИHTEPHET"Hey guys! We're at, er, yeeeeh-nnnnn-tttt-errrrrr-nnnnyyyy-ehhh----.
[pause]
"Oh. Internet."
One of the many stops along the Trans-Mongolian railway. I'll get back to you on whether you can check your e-mail there.
On the restaurant car in the train I managed, with the assistance of my Lonely Planet Russian Phrasebook culinary reader section, to translate 3 items on the menu as being 'fish pie.'
Ultimately Cyrillic requires a great deal of patience in addition to highly developed abstract reasoning skills. I may score off the charts on the latter but anyone who knows me, knows I lack the former - so I give up.
I have all confidence that Mandarin will be much easier.
