Lesson 6. Read Kazakh Cyrillic without losing letters

Why this matters

Change one letter on an envelope and it may go to the wrong address. For our model, үй and уй are also different spellings. Before analyzing a word, we need to receive exactly what the person typed.

Setup and the whole program

Use the ai-course folder from lesson 2. If you do not have it, follow that lesson’s installation and launch steps first. Create a plain-text file called letters.py there. UTF-8 is a way to save the letters in a file so Python reads them correctly. Select UTF-8 if your editor asks for an encoding.

word = input("Сөз: ")
print(word)

The ready-to-run file is in the course project folder; read the code explanation in this lesson first.

Run python3 letters.py on macOS/Linux or py letters.py on Windows. At Сөз: , type үй and press Enter. You will see Сөз: үй and then үй on the next line.

Every step explained

input(...) pauses the program and waits for a line from the keyboard. The quoted text is a prompt for the person; it is not part of the answer. Enter ends the input. word = saves the answer under the name word; print(word) displays it. Lesson 2 explained variables, =, quotation marks, and print. The colon inside the quotes is just prompt text, not a Python command.

Kazakh Cyrillic has letters worth checking carefully: ә ғ қ ң ө ұ ү һ і, along with their uppercase forms. ү and у are distinct, like different digits in a phone number. Our program preserves what was entered; it does not yet judge whether the word is spelled correctly. Latin y does not stand for Cyrillic у.

Memory map

Keyboard → input → text stored in word → print → the same text. UTF-8 preserves letters in the file; you still need to type the intended letters.

Recall and check

Hide the code and rebuild both lines from the map. Explain where the word on the second output line came from. Run the program afresh with үй, өнер, and қала. Each time the second line should exactly match your input. If the letters look wrong, check your keyboard layout and the file encoding.

Task: change only the prompt to Атау: and enter мектеп. Hint: change the string inside input(...), not word. Answer: word = input("Атау: "); the screen shows Атау: мектеп, then мектеп. Common mistake: print("word") displays the literal word word, because quotation marks make text, not a variable name.