Elementary Russian, St. Petersburg College

In addition to the resources in your book, there are a number of excellent sites on the Web that offer lessons:

• Start with Bucknell's Cyrillic alphabet guide. The words in the list are all written with the Cyrillic alphabet but if you read them carefully, one word at a time, from top to bottom beginning at the top of the left-hand column, by the time you reach the final word in the lower right-hand corner, you will know the Cyrillic alphabet (as well as a few Russian words).
• Bucknell's site also has a good overview of pronunciation of Russian letters. Read the notes that accompany some of the letters -- they'll help clear up any questions you have.
• langintro.com has a introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet that uses common words like YES and NO in Russian to teach the basics. What makes this site very valuable is its many sound files -- click on the speaker button, and hear the words spoken.
• At Master Russian you'll find a chart with all 33 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet and recordings of each letter.
• Get more help at ruslang.com's Alphabet introduction page
• Your book does an excellent job at introducing the alphabet and Russian pronunciation. Be sure to listen to all the exercises and practice, practice, practice!

I find the following breakdown of letters useful:

• Just like English (Latin) letters: А, Е, З (the letter Z, like we write in cursive), К, М, О, Т
• Greek letters: Б, Г, Д, И, Л, П, Ф. Many of these you’ll recognize from Geometry and Algebra class (pi (П=P), delta (Д=D), lamda (Л=L), iota (И=I)). The rest you might recognize from fraternities and sororities.
• Tricksters: These look like letters we have in English, but are NOT:

Cyrillic Trickster	Latin (i.e., English) Equivalent
В	V
Н	N
Р	R
С	S
У	U (think ooooo)
Х	roughly the letter H, but the passage of air is restricted more than the English

• Weird Russian letters: Ж, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ы, Э, Й, Ю, Я. Some of these were borrowed from Semitic languages, but most of them were just made up to represent sounds unique to Slavic languages.
• Silent letters: There are two characters in Russian, ь and ъ, that have no pronunciation value themselves. Instead they indicate pronunciation values of preceding consonants. The “soft sign” indicates that the preceding consonant is “softened” or, more correctly, that it undergoes palatization. The “hard sign” is relatively rare – it indicates that the preceding consonant is NOT softened when you might otherwise think that it IS. You teacher will help you to articulate “soft” consonants.