Approximately one-third of the Cyrillic alphabet consists of letters that are identical to the Roman alphabet, with a phonetic value that is either almost equal or similar. Another third of the letters, are recognizable to Westerners because of their Greek origin:  п is the Greek pi, p is the Greek rho, and so forth. The final third consists of letters that were created to represent sounds in the Slavic languages that had no counterpart in the original Greek of the missionary monks. Some of these letters have Hebrew origin, such as the letter ш [sh].

Although there are visual and phonetic similarities, almost no Russian letter is pronounced in quite the same way as its in English counterpart. Russian vowels are purer and more clear than English vowels, and, except for combinations with the consonant-glide Й, do not form diphthongs. Many Russian consonants form “hard” and “soft” pairs, which are not easy to represent in English. Consonants that are plosive in English (p, b, t, d) are not plosive in Russia, which makes their pronunciation for English speakers difficult. At last, the famous Russian fricatives Ш [sh], Ж [zh], Ч [ch], Щ [sh’], Ц [ts] pose challenges all their own.