alt Hacker NewsIt’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Replies
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
I found after learning Greek I could instantly read Cyrillic too
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Yes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.