This utterly brilliant Read the Cyrillic Alphabet in 5 Minutes post manages to teach the basics of this alphabet in a few paragraphs, and it’s actually not that hard to learn. I’m gobsmacked, having struggled mightily with trying and failing to understand Moscow road and tube signs back in the day. It’s actually not all gobbledygook, fantastic. Now if someone could do this for Japanese and/or Chinese we’d be set.
It used to be that when I saw Russian words like this– ??????´???, ?????´??, ??´?????– my eyes skipped over them like yours probably just did. But the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used in Slavic languages like Russian as well as non-Slavic languages like Kazakh and Mongolian, is easy to learn.
Yah sorry about the munged Russian text, looks like WordPress doesn't like it.