>Well, guys, let's be reasonable here. The Russian alphabet does not lend itself easily to English phonetic translation. The opposite is true: My Russian friends rarely pronounce my first name correctly because there's no hard "j" sound in Russian.
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>Also, regarding pronunciation of Russian names, there's this weird (for English speakers) thing about "o"s in Russian becoming "eh"s when not the stressed syllable. So an English speaker is going to see Gorbachov and may think G-oh-rbach-oh-ff when the ending "o" is actually pronounced as an "eh".
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>As to umlauts, I don't recall any umlauts in Cyrillic. There's this weird dippy line sometimes but that's not an umlaut, an umlaut is two dots over a vowel to denote a change in pronunciation. Umlauts are German, I thought. Maybe my memory is faulty.
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>Also, the (I suck at phonetic spelling of Russian words so be forewarned) "myachyi snyak" and "tvordyi snyak" ... the soft sign and hard sign have no English equivalencies. An English speaker wouldn't know to put the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth to properly pronounce, say, "nachalnik" (boss).
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>English speakers with no Russian training just don't know that "zh", "ch", "tch", "ts" are single letters. And that the letter G is only a G when it's not an R. There are 33 letters; we're only used to 26!
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Actually, it is 'myaghkiy' and 'tvyordy znak'. The 'problem' usually arises when latin alphabet is used to write Russian words. This process is not conventional and there are no rules for that. At some point, after revolution, there was an effort to move Russian to Latin alphabet (it was abandoned, though Russian Cyrillic was reformed anyway, and some letters, not quite understandable for modern Russian speakers, were abolished). If it would be done that time then now we could have rules.
By the way, the letter 'G' could be pronounced as 'V' or 'H' sometimes, but I cannot remind where it is used as 'R'.