For those who are absolute beginners at learning the Russian language, the first thing you need is to learn the Russian alphabet. Some people are surprised to find out that the Russian alphabet is really easy. If you take it seriously, you can learn it in a single day.
The best resource I have found for learning the Russian alphabet is the little 15 minute guide over at the ryanestrada.com website. Here is the first part of it:
There is still more. Check out the rest of this handy guide over at the ryanestrada.com website.
I have yet to convince friends and family to consider it's not that hard to learn if you put your mind to it.
We're seeing rapid progress which is encouraging. I put off learning the alphabet years ago, but about 6 months ago I decided to learn the alphabet in song form to help remember, and bit by bit I started to memorize it. Now reading is getting more fluent.
Russian writing is mostly Phonetically correct, so unlike English which has silly words that make no sense like Nose vs. Lose, or how Centre is not pronounced Sentree, or Dear not De-ah-r, or Knife not K'NIFF-eh, or Knight not K'Nig-ht and so on. How it is written in Cyrillic is most of the time how it sounds compared to English. Though there is the Case system, I still think it makes it so much easier for a non-native beginner when starting Russian.
'Read Cyrillic in 3 Hours' is an app (actually a video series by the same guy who does 'Russian Made Easy') that made it stick for me. But this is good--I was familiar with Ryan's work with Korean, but didn't know he did one for Russian.