There are several common ways of transliterating Russian to English. The transliterations do not correspond to the Library of Congress system most commonly used in America, or to other systems used. These systems are useful for reading and indexing, but as a pronunciation guide, they might only cause laughter amongst the listeners. In this transliterated system, a "y" breaks up a vowel cluster into distinctly pronounced syllables, so that "aye" is pronounced "ah-yeh." Non-accented vowels "o" and "e" are devoiced, pronounced "ah" and "ee" respectively.

  All words in Russian are to be read as they are written. No combinations of letters make any other sounds but the sequence of their own. The hard and and soft signs could be presented by a single apostrophe since they never take the same place in a word. In Russian, quotation marks appear like this: ,,gymnastics´´, the first set is below the word while the second set is above the word.