Azbuka: Learn Cyrillic

Nextech Systems

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this game

Cyrillic looks familiar until it isn't. В is not a B, Н is not an H, Р is not a P, and С is not a C. Azbuka drills those letters until the script reads as itself, instead of as a broken alphabet you keep having to decode.

SIXTY-FIVE ALPHABETS, KEPT SEPARATE
Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, Mongolian, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Sakha, Ossetian, Chechen, Abkhaz — sixty-five in all, running from thirty letters up to Abaza's seventy-two. Progress is tracked per alphabet, so starting a second one never disturbs what you have learned in the first.

FLASHCARDS THAT ASK PROPERLY
A letter on a printed card and four answers — and the wrong ones are the letters people genuinely confuse: В with Б, Н with Х and И, С with Ц and З. Guessing will not carry you. Practise Cyrillic to Latin, Latin to Cyrillic, or mixed, which is the only setting that stops you learning one direction and calling it done.

THE ITALIC FORMS, WHICH NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT
Open a real book and the lowercase letters change shape. и becomes a u, п becomes an n, т becomes an m. Serbian and Russian typography disagree about б г д п т, and each alphabet here shows the forms its own printers actually use. Learn only the upright shapes and the first italic sentence you meet is a wall.

YOUR HARDEST LETTERS, NOT A FIXED LIST
Every answer is recorded. Letters you keep missing gather into a tricky-letters deck, and they leave it once you have genuinely learned them — so the deck stays honest, and eventually closes.

A DAILY HABIT
Finish a deck to keep your streak. Miss a day and it resets, which is rather the point of a streak.

• The whole alphabet at a glance, with a mastery dot on every letter
• Letters set in a real serif — including Ә, Ҳ, Ӕ, Ҩ and the rest of the extended range, which other apps render as empty boxes
• Works entirely offline
• No timers, no lives, no energy meter to wait on
• Sound and haptics, both switchable
• One-time purchase to remove ads, if you would rather not see them

Thirty letters is an afternoon. Reading them without translating is a few weeks.