This page does not intend to teach you Russian. It's on a MGS site, not a linguistics course for the eager Russian student! But you may have noticed just how many little details of MGS3 are actually in Russian. Each time you enter a new level, the name will be given in Russian too, and you'll find that the Official Strategy Guide has a lot of Russian characters and words in the background. If you're keen to become more involved in MGS3, basic understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet is required!
There are more characters in the Cyrillic alphabet than the Roman alphabet (that's the one these words are in). Three of the characters (ъ, ы and ь) will be left off the table below because they are not majorly important to know or easy to use - they have the purpose of softening sounds and so forth but unless you're planning to get some sort of qualification in Russian, I think we can leave these off here!
For those of you who are familiar with the Greek alphabet (either modern or classical), you may see some similarities in the characters used by the Russians.
"z" as in "Zanzibar" or "s" as in "please" "p" as in "president" "s" as in "snake"Uppercase Lowercase Pronunciation А а "a" as in "father" Б б "b" as in "boss" В в "v" as in "viper" Г г "g" as in "gear" Д д "d" as in "dock" Е е "ye" as in "yes" Ё ё "yo" as in "yonder" Ж ж "s" as in "pleasure" З з И и "ee" as in "meet" Й й "y" as in "Roy" К к "k" as in "key" Л л "l" as in "full" but harder sound М м "m" as in "metal" Н н "n" as in "nuclear" О о "o" as in "solid" П п С с Т т "t" as in "terrorist" У у "oo" as in "shoot" Ф ф "f" as in "fury" Х х "kh"/"ch" as is "loch" (throaty sound) Ц ц "tz" as in "quartz" Ч ч '"ch" as in "lunch" Ш ш "sh" as in "shot" Щ щ "shch" as in "fresh cheese" Э э "e" as in "end" Ю ю "u" as in "useful" Я я "ya" as in "yard"
One thing you could do with this new knowledge of the Cyrillic Alphabet is use it for communication purposes. Send encoded messages to your colleagues or classmates (to the annoyance of the staff!) but don't blame me if you get arrested for sending coded messages in the Cyrillic alphabet which concern blowing up America with nuclear weapons. Authorities may get suspicious or panicky!
