Cyrillic Forest Walk with Cats
ねこと学ぶキリル文字 — ロシア語アルファベットの森の散歩
A free, open web textbook of Russian built for Japanese-speaking learners —
a walk through a forest where 33 hand-drawn cats introduce the 33 letters of the
Cyrillic alphabet, and the path continues all the way to participles, gerunds
and the subjunctive.
Please note: the language of instruction is Japanese.
The explanations rely on Japanese–Russian contrast (particles vs. cases,
Japanese loan-word phonetics, and so on), so the app is most useful to readers of Japanese.
This page exists so that colleagues and researchers abroad can see what the project is.
What is inside
- The alphabet — 33 letters, each with an original cat illustration,
a mnemonic word, an example sentence, audio, and a spelling quiz.
- Phonics — final devoicing, vowel reduction, assimilation, hard/soft
consonants, stress minimal pairs (за́мок/замо́к) with listen-and-compare buttons.
- 52 grammar units — noun gender to the six cases, verbal aspect, verbs of
motion with prefixes, participles, gerunds, conditional бы;
plus vocabulary units (colours, clothing, seasons, character) illustrated by the author.
- 563 exercises, where every wrong option has its own explanation —
not only why the answer is right, but why each distractor is wrong.
- Spaced repetition of missed items, dictation mode, a paper-notebook
method with printable A4 worksheets, and an offline-capable PWA.
- A hand-drawn map of the curriculum as a forest — learners see where
they are walking, day-by-day footprints included.
Design commitments
- All illustrations and photographs are original work by the author.
- No ads, no account, no paywall; learning data stays on the device and is
shared with the author only if the learner explicitly submits it.
- Accessibility: WCAG AA contrast throughout,
lang="ru" tagging
for screen readers, keyboard focus indicators.
For researchers and teachers
The app is part of a study on materials development for Russian-language education
in Japan. It is released under
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 —
free to use and share in classrooms with attribution; contact the author for other uses.
Cite as: Sugiyama, Mao (2026). Neko to manabu kiriru moji
[Learning Cyrillic with cats]. https://maosugiyama.github.io/russian/
Machine-readable citation: CITATION.cff in the
repository.
アプリを開く — Open the app
Japanese interface · works on phones · free
© 2026 Mao Sugiyama · Nagoya University of Foreign Studies