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.

Comments

the alphabet

[yers.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for a site I found some years ago, which teaches Cyrillic intelligently - not by taking the letters in alphabetical order, but starting with the five letters which are the same as in Latin - A,K,M,O,T, then going to the ones that look like Latin letters but are pronounced differently - B,E,H,P,C,X, and ending with the ones that are peculiar to Cyrillic.

I can't find this site right now, but I'll come back as soon as I do.