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Ukrainian alphabet

Ukrainian alphabet is Ukrainian Cyrillic, 33 letters. 33 letters — and about two thirds of them you can decode on sight, because they match their Latin look-alikes. The characters are grouped: letters english never gave you, two familiar shapes that lie, read them the way they look. Below is a table with sound and a breakdown by groups.

Updated September 1, 2026 · Lingofly

Letters English never gave you

The heart of the alphabet lesson. The pair y and i looks almost identical but sounds different — one is a pulled-back i, the other a pure ee — and mixing them up mixes up "you" and "no". Add ye and yi, two letters that pack a y-glide plus a vowel into one sign.

Two familiar shapes that lie

The letters are letters you know; the sounds are not. The h-looking letter is a breathy voiced sound with no English twin, while the hard g of "go" hides behind a rare letter of its own. And the shch letter is always two sounds: sh plus ch.

Read them the way they look

Twenty-six letters an English eye decodes within minutes of learning the Cyrillic shapes. Only two habits to pick up: e is always a plain e as in "bet", never "ye", and every o stays a round o — it never fades to "uh" when unstressed.

What to know about the “Ukrainian Cyrillic” script

There are 33 letters. Most consonants and vowels look and sound the way an English eye expects once you learn the trick of reading Cyrillic shapes; the letters that genuinely need a lesson are only a handful, and they come first. Two things Cyrillic does that English never does: an apostrophe (written like a comma high up) is not a letter but a separator — it sits between a consonant and ya, yu, ye, yi to show they do not melt together (p'yat — five, im'ya — name). And stress is never written: the same word can be stressed on either syllable, and a dictionary flip is the only cure.

Where this script came from and why it looks the way it does

  • The letter ґ is the only one the Ukrainian alphabet has lost and won back: the reform of 1933 threw it out, and in 1990 it returned. It is exactly the letter for the hard Russian “g”; in living words it can be counted in single digits: ґанок, ґудзик.

    The current ‘Ukrainskyi pravopys’ [Ukrainian orthography], Potebnia Institute of Linguistics, 2019 edition

Test yourself

Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.

  1. Which character reads as “a as in "father"”?
  2. Which character reads as “a breathy h, as in "a-ha"”?
  3. Which character reads as “e as in "bet"”?
  4. Which character reads as “z as in "zoo"”?
  5. Which character reads as “yee, as in "yield"”?

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.

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 Ukrainian alphabet?

33 letters — Ukrainian Cyrillic. The characters have capital and small forms.

Can I listen to how the Ukrainian letters sound?

Not yet: we have no recordings for this script. That is why there is no sound button either — it would be silent.

How long does it take to learn the Ukrainian 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.

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Work through Ukrainian letters one by oneLearn the letters