The Russian letter Щ (shcha) is a soft, palatalized "sh" sound, often described as a combination of "sh" and "ch" said quickly (sh-ch), but it's actually a unique, longer, softer, hissing sound, like a very soft, prolonged English "sh," with the tongue pressed high to the palate. It's distinct from the harder 'Ш' and is pronounced with a more forward, flatter tongue and slightly smiling lips for a lighter sound, unlike the 'Ш' which has a deeper 'sh' with a curled tongue.
Zhe, Zha, or Zhu, sometimes transliterated as Že (Ж ж; italics: Ж ж or Ж ж; italics: Ж ж) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant /ʐ/ (listen) or voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the pronunciation of the ⟨s⟩ in "measure".
Short I or Yot/Jot (Й й; italics: Й й or Й й; italics: Й й) (sometimes called I Kratkoye, Russian: и краткое, Ukrainian: йот) or I with breve, Russian: и с бреве) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is made of the Cyrillic letter И with a breve.
In Modern Russian, the letter "ъ" is called the hard sign (твёрдый знак / tvjordyj znak). It has no phonetic value of its own and is purely an orthographic device or it doesn't make a sound. Its function is to separate a number of prefixes ending in consonants from subsequent morphemes that begin with iotated vowels.
People write 'z' as a '3' (or a cursive 'z' looks like a '3') due to shared origins with the Greek letter Zeta (Ζ) in both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, creating similar fluid, looping shapes in handwriting, and sometimes to distinguish it from other letters like '2' or 'y', with some variations like the ezh (Ʒ) in Slavic languages looking identical to '3'.
Y at the end of the word says e or i (long vowels). Y alone says it almost like yu (like in up). I guess it can be yee depending on where you are from. But drop the extra sounds and focus on just Y alone.
Be (Б б; italics: Б б or Б б; italics: Б б) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, like the English pronunciation of ⟨b⟩ in "ball".
The Cyrillic letter Ef was derived from the Greek letter Phi (Φ φ). It merged with and eliminated the letter Fita (Ѳ) in the Russian alphabet in 1918. The name of Ef in the Early Cyrillic alphabet is фрьтъ (fr̥tŭ or frĭtŭ), in later Church Slavonic and Russian form it became фертъ (fert).
In Russian, "paka" (пока) is an informal way to say "bye" or "bye-bye," often used with friends, family, or young people, similar to English casual farewells, and saying it twice ("paka paka") just makes it more informal and friendly, like "bye-bye". It's a shortened form of "poka," which literally means "while," but in farewells, it means "until [we meet]" or "bye".
Ы is the 29th letter of the Russian alphabet; it also appears in the Belarusian alphabet and in Cyrillic-based variants of Tatar and Kazakh.
The Arabic letter ى is called Alif Maqṣūrah (أَلِف مَقْصُورَة), meaning "restricted alif," or sometimes Alif Layyinah (أَلِف لَيِّنَة), meaning "flexible alif". It looks like the letter ي (Yaa) but without the dots and functions as a long 'a' (ā) vowel sound, appearing only at the end of words, like in "على" (ʿAlā - on).
Since Arabic has no /p/ sound, Arab speakers will often pronounce /p/ as /b/ like banda, bear or bolice. The English words pencil often pronounced as bencil and Pepsi as bebsi (Jenkins, 2009).
In Old Slavonic orthography, which is closely related to Proto-Slavic, the soft sign (Ь) and the hard sign (Ъ) were originally used to represent the extra-short vowel sounds. These extra-short vowels were distinct from regular short vowels in terms of their duration or length.