The Lowercase R That Makes a Hard G Sound

Russian has a letter that, to an English-speaking reader, looks a lot like a lowercase r:

г

It is called гэ, but it does not make an English r sound.

It usually makes the hard g sound heard at the beginning of English words such as go, game, and good.

So one of the first mappings a Russian learner has to establish is:

г looks like r, but sounds like the hard G in “go.”

Fair enough.

гора город говорить

You see г, ignore the English-looking shape, and produce a hard g sound. Cyrillic is new, but the mapping is manageable.

Then Russian gives you this:

сегодня

I looked at the word, identified the letters, and tried to pronounce exactly what was written.

се-го-дня

Wrong.

In this word, the г is pronounced more like в, the Russian equivalent of an English v sound:

сегодня → севодня

Not spelled that way. Pronounced that way.

The lowercase r that I had already trained myself to read as a hard g had now become a v.