Russian

Russian, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, is the principal language of the Russian Federation, and was previously the official language of the Soviet Union. As a result, it is an important language in all of the former Soviet Republics in the Baltic (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), the trans-Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan), Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus) and Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan). It was also significant in other Communist countries (mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, plus Cuba), and in countries previously allied in lesser degrees with the Soviet Union.

If you know Russian, please give us examples and links.

Великий могучий русский язык является самым важным в постсоветском пространстве. Страны бывшего Советского Союза объединяются в ЕЭП (Единое Экономическое Пространство) чтобы создать центральноазийскую версию Евросоюза.

• Eurasian Economic Community
• http://www.eepnews.ru/
• Slavayanka Russian Chorus, based in San Francisco
• Russian-English, English-Russian online dictionary

Some Russian letters are the same as English ones. Some of them look the same but are really not, for instance the letter that looks like B is really a V and the one that looks like C is really an S. Some letters look the same as Greek letters in their capital forms, for instance Greek capital PI and RHO are used for P and R. Other letters were either invented or were adopted from Coptic or from Turko-Bulgar runic characters that were used by Slavic people before conversion to Christianity.

The Russian language is easy to learn because its grammatical rules are much simpler than most European languages. Its spelling rules are almost entirely phonetical so once you know the alphabet, you can easily read and write any words. Many Russian words are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to one or two syllable roots and once you learn the patterns for doing this it is easy to understand new words without looking in a dictionary. This really speeds up the process of learning new vocabulary. In addition, when you don't know a word, you can guess at it by building a word from known roots, prefixes and suffixes. If your guess is wrong it is usually still understandable.

The Russian language is used in business and trade over a large area of Europe and Asia from the Baltic states to Turkey, Iran, India and China. These countries are neighbors to former Soviet Republics in which Russian is the lingua franca when it is not the official language.