xquercus

There is no need to speak or read Russian in order to navigate. I took a semester of Russian in college with the goal of simply being able to pronounce words as I came across them. Learning how to pronounce Cyrillic characters is a pretty short process with some flash cards. Being able to pronounce entire words actually turned out to be quite difficult as Russian, like English, has multiple levels of stress and no formal rules to guide the reader on how each syllable is stressed. This is unlike, for example, Spanish -- which has two levels of stress and a very formal system for determining which syllable is stressed. In Spanish, if a word doesn't fit the formal rules, an accent mark is explicitly placed in the word so the reader knows exactly how it's pronounced. Written English and Russian simply don't contain all of the information required in order to know how to pronounce the word. They have to be heard and memorized or you have to look the word up in a dictionary and decipher all of the stress marks in the pronunciation guide. However, with some flashcards anyone can memorize the sound each Cyrillic character makes in pretty short order and will have no problem navigating. Virtually all Cyrillic characters only make one sound -- with few exceptions -- unlike the mess that is English. Stress levels won't be correct if the word is spoken but it's a quick 90% solution.