Introduction

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Hello. Finally. It's about time we had a community for non-native learners of Russian - I only hope there's enough interest to keep it going. :)

I'm a second semester student of Russian and plan to continue on to next year. I'm a bit of a language geek, so I'll be here, asking and answering questions left and right. I only ask that you forgive me when I make mistakes.

Transliteration of "ы"

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with any transliteration schemes for Russian; whenever I write down how to pronounce something for a friend who isn't taking Russian, I just pick the closest latin letter. But this creates problems.

For example, unstressed "o." Should I write it as "o" even though it's reduced and sounds more like "a"? And what about "й"? I usually write it as "y", but this makes names like "Nikolay" appear to rhyme with "hay." But the most troublesome letter is "ы" - there's just no equivalent.

So, do any of you have any favorite transliteration schemes? What sort of transliteration schemes are out there?

Intro and questions

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

I've taken fair amounts of French, Japanese, and Spanish in the past, but I'm planning on starting Russian next year, and hopefully becoming relatively fluent one day (vague silly dreams of grad school in Russia, desire to read Chinghiz Aitmatov in the original, things like that). I have two questions:

1) Does anyone know how widely spoken Russian is in Mongolia today? I know there was a while under the Soviets when the Mongolian language was represented in Cyrillic, but I don't know how much the language itself was spoken.

2) As I'd rather like to get a head start, can anyone recommend an easily-obtainable, good starting text, preferably one that starts by learning Cyrillic.

Thanks.

Интродукция

[corriel.livejournal.com]

I'm French and started to learn Russian in high school. I love this language (and Russia in general) but I didn't make any real progress since I finished high school, despite taking some Russian courses in university. Thus I'm glad there's such a community!