The hard sign does not produce any particular sound and is always used with such vowels as Я, Е, and Ё to make them and preceding letters sound harder. In this lesson, you will practice almost all the words in which this character is used.

You've been practicing a lot in the previous lessons. Now it is time to evaluate how well you can read and produce Russian sounds. This is the first cumulative self-test, in which you will test your ability to read Russian words and produce correct sounds.

This is the second self-test that will allow you to check your ability to read in Russian and produce sounds. The words in the self-test represent some of the words that you practiced in the previous lessons.

This is the last self-test for Russian letters and sounds that will indicate if you can move forward or go back and practice the Russian letters and their sounds more because knowing letters and sounds is important for learning Russian as a whole.

Russian doesn't use any special characters like English does to show how words should be pronounced. At the same time, not all Russian words are pronounced as they are written. In this lesson, you’ll learn the differences between spelling and pronunciation.

Although we write ЦИ and ЦЕ we never pronounce them as they are written. In this lesson, you will learn why the letters И and Е change to the sounds Ы and Э in these letter combinations and practice them in Russian words.

The letter combinations ЖИ and ЖЕ are correct in standard written Russian but in real-life speech, we always pronounce them ЖЫ and ЖЭ. In this lesson, you will learn why we do so and practice the sounds in words.