So I don't know Russian very well yet, but I can explain a little bit about the language in terms of spelling and pronunciation.
The Russian language uses letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. There are 33 letters in total: 20 consonants, 11 vowels, and 2 pronunciation characters. Some of these letters are the same as ones in English, others, may have similar sounds but different symbols. In order, here are the letters:
You may want to bookmark or print this list, it helps to remember the letters so you don't have to look silly going back and having to find the letter you forgot how to pronounce.
I have a few complaints about some of the letters in the chart. The letter "е" is often pronounced without the y in front of it. Additionally, the letter "й" is a subtle "y", like "boy" (on the chart), not harsh like "yarn". Make sure you don't confuse "з" and "э", while one is pronounced "z", the other is pronounced "eh" (respectively).
The easy part about pronunciation is that most of the time, letters are pronounced the same way no matter how they're arranged; English is much more difficult in the sense that vowels change how other letters are pronounced.
Here are a few examples (use the above chart unless you already know the letters/already memorized):
привет - preevet - Hello/Hi
да - da - Yes
нет - nyet - No
лол - lol
Useful resources:
http://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/getting_started.phphttp://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/lesson1_main.phphttp://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/lesson1_alphabet.phphttp://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/lesson3_main.phpSo you might be asking yourself, "Self, how the залупа am I supposed to type this on an English keyboard?" Well, it's actually quite easy if you're on Windows. Simply go to Control Panel, click on Regional and Language options, go to the Keyboards and Languages tab, then click the Change keyboards button. In there, you can add keyboard layouts for various languages. I'd recommend the standard "Russian (Russia)/Keyboard/Russian" option, although there are other mappings as well. Then click the Advanced Key Settings tab and choose key sequences for switching between two or more languages. I use alt-shift because it's the only one that doesn't conflict with anything else. Then simply press alt-shift whenever you need to type in Russian.
Sorry, don't know how to do it on Mac
One potential problem, however, is learning where the keys are. There are several solutions to this. The one I'd recommend is a nifty piece of shareware called
Frontype. Frontype shows keys you're pressing on a semi-transparent HUD overlay that can be configured to show up only on certain programs. What's useful, however, is that when you switch to another key mapping such as Russian, Frontype will change the characters it shows as well. It works free for 7 days then stops showing keypresses and doesn't reflect on keymap changes.
