IPA (international phonetic alphabet) is valuable to learn if you're learning languages. It is, for the most part, universal and can help you learn the sounds of a language. Check it out here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet English's phone-to-symbol correspondence is awful. Russian's sounds follow its orthography pretty exact. I hope that sort-of answers your question...

IPA has its uses, but it also has its weaknesses. It's a French/British creation so you can see a fair amount of cultural bias from that perspective as well. I don't think it's a good idea to rely on this system. If you're learning to speak a language based on reading out phonetics, it's pretty much guaranteed that you will just sound strange. For major languages, it's VERY easy to find material and speakers, especially through the internet, so why not use those instead? In contrast to a language like English which often has haphazard pronunciation rules, there's Irish Gaelic, which is written very phonetically - however, it has different rules on how the word should be written, so IPA is near useless if you're trying to work out a word like ""taoiseach". Really, just learn the language's alphabet, accept their spelling rules and work with that. It'll save you so much time.