For the convenience of new visitors to this thread, I am repeating my earlier phonetic breakdown of the ENTIRE Cyrillic/Russian alphabet. Note that some Russian vowels, like all English vowels, have "long" and "short" sounds. "Short" sounds in Russian are in effect when the vowel appears in an UNSTRESSED syllable. Note also that the alphabet shared by English and French is technically the Latin alphabet.
А is like French or Spanish A: its long sound is like English "AH." Short sound is "UH."
Б is the same as our letter B.
В is your first example of _misleading_ visual resemblance. It _looks_ like our B, but its true sound is V. Just to complicate your life, in certain uses (when a non-vocalized consonant sounds better than a vocalized one to the Russian taste) it sounds like F instead.
Г is the same as a hard G. But in certain specialized uses, like the object pronoun ЕГО , it sounds like V.
Д is the same as a D in Latin alphabet.
Е has a long sound like "YEH." Short sound is like a _long_ E in English. For more headaches to the student, if E has dots on top of it, thus-- Ё -- it sounds like "YO." And as if that weren't bad enough, most Russian publications _assume_ that the readers already know which YEH's should be YO's, so they don't bother to distinguish the YO's with dots in the printing process! (Are you sure you want to continue?)
Ж has the same sound as J has in French.
З is the same as a Z .
И is like I in Latin or French or Spanish; _never_ like a long I in English.
Й is used similarly to the way a Y is used in English words like "turkey": always working together with other vowels. This Russian letter can sometimes be found if Russian writers render in their alphabet a word which in English used Y.
К is the same as our K; here, the resemblance is NOT misleading.
Л corresponds exactly to a Latin L .
М likewise is M.
Н _looks_ like our H, but really _sounds_ as N.
О has long sound the same as English O, but in short sound may be either "AH" or "UH."
П corresponds to Latin P.
Р _looks_ like a Latin P, but _sounds_ as R.
С sounds as a soft C, thus does the job of S.
Т simply is T.
У makes the sound "OOH."
Ф is the same as our F.
Х is a "guttural;" it makes the throat-clearing sound "KH."
Ц sounds like the consonant combination "TS" as in "Betsy." This is the consonant which is put in the middle when a Russian renders our word "pizza" into the Russian alphabet.
Ч is exactly like English CH as in "chair."
Ш makes the sound SH.
Щ is very similar to the previous, only sort of thicker. It usually is transliterated by Westerners using _four_ letters--SHCH--to the original one Russian letter.
Ы ("the sixty-one") is probably the most hated letter for Americans learning Russian, because its sound is hard to define. In some words, where it follows a vocalized consonant such as M, this Russian vowel makes a fairly easy "WEE" sound; but at other times it's like a garbled version of a French EU.
Ю is a nice, well-behaved vowel, with just one sound: same as English word "YOU." The only exception is when _two_ of this Russian letter are set right next to each other, in which case the first one fades a bit, resulting in a sound like "YI-YOO."
Э is a sort of dull, flat variant on the Russian E. (Their own name for this letter actually means "Backwards E.") Its one sound is like an English short E, as in "pet" or "set." Since Russian does not use the sound of the short English A as in "black" or "that," when Russians transliterate that sound into their alphabet they often use Э .
Я has _nothing_ to do with Latin R. It is a vowel. Its long sound is "YAH," while short sound is like English long E.
I list separately two characters which don't have any sound of their own, but which exist to make maddeningly subtle changes in the sounds of _consonants_ which come immediately _before_ them. Ь is known as the "soft sign," while Ъ is the "hard sign." The first of the two is used much more often than the second; almost every Russian _verb,_ in its infinitive form, ends with a soft sign. The hard sign was much more frequently seen a century ago, before a Russian-alphabet reform occurred.
