Russian (Phonetic) Keyboard

Type Russian using English letters! Phonetic mode lets you type Russian words the way they sound. Perfect for heritage speakers who know spoken Russian but aren't familiar with the Cyrillic keyboard layout.

Use your own physical QWERTY keyboard! No need to click the virtual keys — just type naturally on your regular keyboard. The letters are automatically converted to Cyrillic as you type.

Simply type words as you would pronounce them: "privet" becomes "привет", "spasibo" becomes "спасибо", "dobroye utro" becomes "доброе утро".

Common letter mappings: a→а, b→б, v→в, g→г, d→д, e→е, z→з, i→и, k→к, l→л, m→м, n→н, o→о, p→п, r→р, s→с, t→т, u→у, f→ф, h→х, y→ы

Multi-letter combinations: zh→ж, ch→ч, sh→ш, shch→щ, ts→ц, ya→я, yu→ю, yo→ё, ye→е, kh→х. For example: "zhizn'" → "жизнь"

The four keys worth memorising: j→й, y→ы and the two signs — apostrophe (') for the soft sign (ь), quotation mark (") for the hard sign (ъ). Russian words end in these far more often than an English speaker expects, so "dobryj den'" becomes "добрый день" and "chaj" becomes "чай".

Corrections work as you would expect. Phonetic mode reads one whole word at a time and redraws it on every keystroke, so a word keeps changing shape until you finish it — and backspace takes back the English letter you typed, not the Cyrillic one it produced. A space, a comma or Enter ends the word and settles it.