Slightly panicking about Cyrillic street signs - how long before it clicks?

Genuinely comforting news: Cyrillic is the easiest part of Bulgarian, and two weeks of feeling illiterate is normal and temporary. Most people can slowly sound out words within a weekend of deliberate practice, read street signs comfortably within two to three weeks, and stop noticing the alphabet entirely within a couple of months. Your husband is not gifted - he just started. Why it is faster than it looks: of the 30 letters, about a third are identical to Latin letters with the same sounds (А, Е, К, М, О, Т), another chunk you already know from maths and school Greek (П, Ф, Л, Д), and only a dozen or so are genuinely new. The famous trap letters - В is v, Р is r, С is s, Н is n, У is u, Х is h - take a few days of feeling wrong before they flip. Unlike English, Bulgarian spelling is almost perfectly phonetic: once you know the letters, you can pronounce anything, which is why progress feels sudden. The tricks that actually speed it up: practice on cognates and brand names, because the reward is instant - РЕСТОРАНТ is restorant, СУПЕРМАРКЕТ is supermarket, БАНКА is banka, and half the shop signs in Ruse are words you already know wearing a costume. Read every sign out loud as you walk (quietly, or embrace looking eccentric). In the supermarket, sound out three labels per visit. Use your phone camera translate for anything urgent, but resist using it for everything - the struggle is the learning. And take the pressure off: nobody expects speed-reading. Deciphering at toddler pace for a few weeks is the entire method. By the time the leaves turn you will read Ruse street signs without noticing they were ever hard.