It is important for visitors to Russia to learn the Cyrillic Alphabet.
This helps them to read signs, use maps and search for words in a
Russian-English dictionary. Many of the Cyrillic characters look and sound the same as
western characters (e.g. "K"). Some Cyrillic characters look the same,
but are pronounced differently (e.g. "P"). Other characters look completely different
(e.g. reversed "R"). The good news is that there are only
32 characters so it doesn't take long at all to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
By knowing the alphabet, it is amazing how many Russian words you
will recognize on signs. This is because many Russian words have their origins in
the western European languages.
