Re: any help on learning some russian phrases?

Gregory Morrow wrote:
Russian is a
relatively phonetic language (unlike other Slavic languages like
Polish)

All the Slavic languages are phonetic languages. Polish (or Czech/Slovak/Bulgarian) is "more" phonetic then Russian. In Russian, the pronunciation of the letter O depends on whether it is stressed or not. Unstressed O is pronounced like more or less like "a". So, having a word with an O in it, you can't tell how to pronounce it.

igor
.