These are some notes on using transliteration from Russian to English

• Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: 21 consonants, 10 vowels, and two letters without sound: soft sign and hard sign .

• All words in Russian are to be read as they are written. No combinations of letters make any other sound but the sequence of their own.

• There are several common ways of transliteration Russian to English

• These are single letters: ye, yo, zh, ee, ts, ch, sh, shch, ye, yu, ya

• This is a table of Russian alphabet

  

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  NOTE: The voice you hear in the above pronunciations belongs to Natasha Bulashova.

• In Russian quotations, first double apostrophe oppeares down on the line and the second on the top of the line. Nevertheless, it's OK to use traditional place for the first in the pair.
• The hard and and soft signs could be presented by a single apostrophe since they never take the same place in a word.

  The hard sign is used

  a) after consonant ending prefixes, as in ob'em, ot'yezd

  b) in two roots compppound words, as in dvuh'etazhniy, tryoh'yarusniy

  The soft sign is used

  a) on the end of words if they end on a soft sounded consonant

  b) on the end of most words and verbs ending on consonants: ch, sh, zh

  c) in the middle of the words betveen soft l and a consonant

  d) between other soft preseeding and hard following consonants

  The hard sign is not used

  a) niether at the end nor at the begining of the words

  b) after a vowel

  The soft sign is not used

  a) in the following suffixes: chk, chn, nshch, rshch, rch

  b) neither befor nor after a vowel

• In Russian, the word you has plural and singular forms.

  ti - means you singular. It is considered raither impolite when it is addressed to a sranger.

  vi - means you plural.

  Vi - means you singular, but used to express respect. This is concidered the only polite form, but improper between friends.

• Zdravstvuy means a wish to live healthy
• Do sveedaneeya means wish to meet more
• Hello means ...
• Goodbye! The good of good-bye was originally God. The expression is a contraction of God be with you, a form of farewell first recorded in late 16th century. Its gradual reduction can be traced through a series of metamorphoses (Shakespeare, for instance, had God be wy you and God buy' ye), and it did not reach modetn good-bye until the 18th centure. The substitution of good for God seems to have been mainly due to the influence of such phrases as good day and good night.