I agree that new phonetic scripts are EASY! | Success stories and anecdotes | Forum

Hello, I'm Matthew. When I read Benny's article about learning to read Thai I didn't believe him that I could learn to read a new alphabet in a few hours. However, last friday night I started to learn to read the Cyrillic alphabet to learn Russian. It's now Sunday afternoon and from studying about 2 hours friday night and 4 hours yesterday I can sound out words in Russian and have my pronunciation closely match examples!

This was made much easier by a couple of apps that i downloaded to my ipod. I tried a bunch of them and decided that three in particular were the ones that helped me learn the most.

1. Russian Alphabet. Hamdouchi Interactive. This is a free app. This app was really really really helpful! From my russian phrasebook i copied down the sounds that all of the Cyrillic letters and tried to sound out words from the phrasebook, but this was very hard as i did not know any of the letters yet. This app lets you practice russian words by giving you an example with a word with a letter that you are working on. With this example you get to listen to a speaker pronounce the letter and pronounce the word after you have tried to say it yourself. 

2. Russian Alphabet(Lite). This is a free version of an app that I didn't buy because by this time I was already fairly good at recognizing the sounds of The Cyrillic alphabet. This app lets you practice the alphabet by letting you hear the sounds of each letter as many times as you want and then you can test yourself by having the app say random letters aloud and then you select the correct one. 

3. 1000  Most Common Russian Words. Language Daily. This app costs 2.99 USD in the Itunes app store, but I would have easily paid 10 for this gem! It is the 1000 Most Common Russian Words, broken down into divisions of 100 and 25. It is searchable and you can add 100 words to your favorites list. Once I had gotten a basic grasp of the alphabet, this was very useful for trying to sound out words and then listening to a speaker to see if I was right. Very very very helpful!

I hope this helps somebody! Don't let anybody tell you Cyrillic is hard, because I'm a monolingual english speaker and I learned it over the weekend! 

Also the phrasebook I've been using is the Berlitz Russian Phrase book & Dictionary.http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Phrase-Book-English-Edition/dp/9812683283/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1337548839&sr=8-12

I don't particularly like it because most of it is about buying things and ordering food and only has a TINY TINY section of expressions that one uses when talking to people not in a retail setting.(Hopefully most of the time!) However it smells wonderful. It is still helpful to me with my very very modest level of Russian. It's also a lot of good practice for sounding out words. What phrasebooks would you guys recommend that are more people friendly.?  

I'd really like a textbook to work out of that would give me some basic grammar so I can start making sentences that aren't gibberish. Any suggestions? Preferably inexpensive, thanks very much!

     Another thing is that I'm having a little bit of difficulty associating о with the ah sound. Some words it's pronounced differently than others, but even on words that I'm familiar with it's hard for me to get over not saying oh and saying ah instead. Anybody else have this?