Yes, even if you only learn the alphabet it can make a huge difference. You will be able to read all sorts of things, many words actually sound the same as English if you know how to pronounce the letters eg. sport restaurant and bar are just 3

By the way Russian cyrillic and Bulgarian cyrillic are not the same.

Patka

Most useful, because Bulgarian has borrowed words from English, French and German, and if you can pronounce words you will often be able to understand what they mean.

It's not too difficult to pronounce either, unlike English. Because we know Cyrillic we always feel very much at home in Bulgaria and Russia, but lost in countries such as Thailand, Turkey or Israel.

It's well worth learning the alphabet, but better make sure it's Bulgarian Cyrillic because a couple of the lower case letters are a little bit different in Russian.

Peter

Hi Lesley,

As Patka & Peter say, it's very useful if you spend any time in Bulgaria - again, as Patka & Peter say, the present Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet differs from Russian and many other languages which are written in Cyrillic, including Belarusian, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Mongolian.

I tend to spend a lot of time in my 'second home', a Bulgarian village where none of the local people speak English (the nearest is one person who speaks Esperanto and another who speaks some German) so a knowledge of Bulgarian Cyrillic & the spoken Bulgarian is essential to me.

You'll find examples of the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet HERE & HERE.

Baldur