Georgian alphabet
Georgian alphabet is Georgian alphabet (mxedruli), 33 letters. 33 letters, no capitals — but each has a display style of its own, mtavruli. The characters are grouped: five vowels, sharp and aspirated pairs, throat sounds. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Five vowels
Exactly five sounds, all pure: no reduction, and none of them softens a neighboring consonant.
Sharp and aspirated pairs
The whole difficulty of Georgian lives here. An untrained ear hears one sound where Georgian hears two different words: კარი is 'door', ქარი is 'wind'. On the left the sharp one (with a catch in the throat), on the right the one with a puff of air.
Throat sounds
Four letters English does not have at all: ღ a gargled g, ყ from the very bottom of the throat, ხ a hard kh, ჰ a plain exhale.
The remaining consonants
Fourteen letters whose sounds you already know from English. Only the shapes need learning.
What to know about the “Georgian alphabet (mxedruli)” script
There are 33 letters, and exactly 33 sounds: one letter is one sound, nothing is silent, and the letters do not join. There is no case: mtavruli is not a set of capitals but a second style of the same alphabet, used to set whole words, not the first letter. Mxedruli ('of the cavalry') is the third Georgian script by count: before it came asomtavruli and nuskhuri, which survive in church books.
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “a”?
A clean 'a' as in 'father'
- Which character reads as “d”?
Plain 'd' as in 'door'
- Which character reads as “s”?
Plain 's' as in 'sun'
- Which character reads as “n”?
Plain 'n' as in 'no'
- Which character reads as “t'”?
A sharp t with a catch, no puff of air
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 33 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Georgian alphabet?
33 letters — Georgian alphabet (mxedruli). There are no capital and small forms: the character is written the same way everywhere.
Can I listen to how the Georgian letters sound?
Yes. 33 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Georgian alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.