Why the Russian letters Е, Ё, Ю and Я are difficult for bilingual children

What's the complexity of these letters?

Your child expects one letter to represent one clear sound. But in Russian, E, Yo, Yu and I can sound like two sounds at the beginning of a word: spruce, hedgehog, yula, pit. And after the consonant, they often show that the consonant has become soft: a ball, a forest, a hatch.

For a child who learns through English, this is unusual. In English, too, there are complex rules of reading, but the very idea of “letter changes the neighboring sound” in Russian feels different.

What mistakes look like

Your child can read "mint" as "mal", "cloak" as "onion", "sit" as "sal". Sometimes it misses the softness altogether or adds extra sound where it is not.

This can also be seen in the letter: a child may not understand for a long time why one word needs an I rather than an A, and why Yu is not just a beautiful letter for the Y sound.

How to explain without complicated terms

It is not necessary to immediately say “yotized vowels”. It is enough to show your child that these letters can make a consonant soft. You can compare pairs: small - mint, onion - hatch, nose - carried.

Auditory games work well: an adult pronounces a couple of words, and a child guesses where the word “soft” is. Only then does it make sense to write the letters.

When a skill is fixed

Usually a child needs many short repetitions in different words. Once he has understood a rule, it does not mean that he will immediately apply it in reading and writing.

But when the letters E, E, Yu, I cease to be a mystery, it becomes easier for a child to read Russian words smoothly and write consciously, not randomly. A very close subject. softness: These skills often go hand in hand.