Languages/Russian - Alexander Schrøder.NET

I think Russian is a very pretty language. Especially when spoken by women. (Sorry guys, their voices are sweeter.) I would really like to learn Russian, both because I like the language, and because I like Eastern Europe (including Russia, of course), and Russian is kind of a common language there. Although no longer taught everywhere in previously soviet states, many people speak it.

Russian Cyrillic alphabet

This list is mostly borrowed from the Wikibooks article about learning Russian, chapter 1. (This, by the way, implies that this section of this page is covered under the GNU Free Documentation License, as pointed out in its section 7.)

Characters that look the same and have the same pronunciation as their counterparts in the Latin alphabet:

• А, like “car”, not like “cat”
• К
• М
• О, like “bold” when stressed, “soft” when not stressed
• Т

Characters look the same but have a different pronunciation:

• В - usually like “v”, but often like “f” or “w”
• Е - like “ye” in “yellow” when stressed, “ee” in “eel” when not stressed
• Ё - “yo”, always stressed
• Р - “r”
• У - “u”, like “ou” in “you”
• С - “s”
• Н - “n”
• Х - “kh”, like “ch” in “loch”

Other characters with no latin equivalent:

• Л - “l”
• Ц - “ts”, like “ts” in “Pittsburgh”
• Ч - “ch”, like “ch” in “choose”
• Я - “ya”
• Ы - “uy”, close to “ui” in “built”
• И - “i”, like “ee” in “beer”
• Й - “y”, like “y” in “boy”
• П - “p”
• Ш - “sh”, like “sh” in “short”
• Щ - “shch”, like “sh” in “sheet”, a soft version of Ш
• Э - “e”, like “e” in “bet”
• Д - “d”
• Ф - “f”
• Г - “g”, like “g” in “goal”
• Ю - “yu”, like “you”
• З - “z”, like “z” in “zoo”
• Ж - “zh”, like “s” in “leisure”
• Б - “b”

• Ъ - hard sign
• Ь - soft sign

There are 10 vowels in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet: А/а, Е/е, Ё/ё, И/и, О/о, У/у, Ы/ы, Э/э, Ю/ю, and Я/я. Almost all of the rest are consonants. “ъ” and “ь” are neither vowels nor consonants—their presence in a word just fine-tunes the pronunciation of the immediately-preceding letter (which is always a consonant).

The complete alphabet in order:

Аа Бб Вв Гг Дд Ее Ёё Жж Зз Ии Йй Кк Лл Мм Нн Оо Пп Рр Сс Тт Уу Фф Хх Цц Чч Шш Щщ ъ ы ь Ээ Юю Яя

List of phrases that are nice to remember

This list is kind of here as a place to go for looking up things I am likely to forget in the beginning. I will most likely keep it up even when I master the expressions, since others may have use of this collection. These phrases are collected from various places, and since I believe you cannot copyright common phrases and words, I seriously doubt I am breaking any law by having them here.

Greetings, salutations, farewells