In learning the Russian alphabet, I have come to understand that the written and printed forms are slightly different. Here is an image from Baylor.edu showing how both look:

Find out more about the Russian alphabet and Russian cursive on Wikipedia.

Since I set out to learn the Cyrillic clphabet as a starting point in learning Russian, I have made good progress. I can now recognize almost all of the letters in Russian and know their approximate phonetic pronunciation. That is if I see the Cyrillic letter. I still need to be able to hear the sound and write the appropriate Cyrillic letter - that is the next step.

But before I move on, I wanted to clarify a distinction that I have come across while learning the Russian Alphabet: the different between the Russian alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet.

Wikipedia explains the Russian alphabet as such:

"The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was introduced into Kievan Rus' at the time of its conversion to Christianity (988), or, if certain archeological finds are correctly dated, at a slightly earlier date.

Wikipedia explains the Cyrillic alphabet as such:

"The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced /sɪˈrɪlɪk/ also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by a wide variety of Slavic languages—Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. It has also been used for other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language with which it is written.

Thus, "the Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet", which "is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by a wide variety of Slavic languages... as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe".

And while I'm going strong here, what is an alphabet anyway?

Once again, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, an alphabet is...

... a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word or syllable or places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable.

The etymology of the word "alphabet" itself comes to Middle English from the Late Latin Alphabetum which in turn originates from the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.[1] There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are 'linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable exceptions are Braille, manual alphabets, and Morse code.

Omniglot.com also has excellent info about alphabets.

For those out there who have not studied Linguistics, it is important when reading the above-referenced pages to know the difference between a Phonetics and Phonology.

To come full circle, I thought I needed to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, but actually I needed to learn the variant thereof known as the Russian alphabet!

I am finally about to start learning Russian right now (well, after I finish this post). I am going to take an action-oriented approach to learning Russian, meaning that I'll be learning the most important verbs first in an effort to be able to express actions when I speak.

My theory on this is that verbs are what make things happen. So if I want to make things happen in Russian, I need to know the core verbs! These include such verbs as be, go, want, like, give, have, make, do, come, need... key verbs that you say hundreds of times on an average day (depending, of course, on how much you chatter).

At any rate, I will develop that theory in other parts of this site. For now, the explanation above should suffice. But before I begin learning the verbs, I want to learn the Cyrillic alphabet! If I weren't interested in learning to read and write in Russian, I would skip this altogether. But I don't just want to be able to speak Russian, I want to enjoy its written aspects as well.

Some of the best resources I have found in my searches on the Cyrillic alphabet are:

Omniglot.com Info on Russian Alphabet
MasterRussian.com on the Cyrillic Alphabet
Free Language Resources for Learning Cyrillic Alphabet
Swarthmore Page on Russian Alphabet
Learning the Russian Alphabet in Two Hours (Sounds cool! Hope it works.)
An Introduction to Russian Alphabet
Geocities Page on Cyrillic Alphabetl

So before I get into the action, I am going to work on the first step in the lifelong process of learning a foreign language with a foreign alphabet! More to come soon...