I have always thought that Russian is difficult to read because of the stress problem, and the fact that it affects the pronounciation of vowels, particularly О and Я. It's like when in class we sometimes get given newspaper articles, and have to read them aloud. It's hard because you often don't know where to put the stress.

Anyways, then I started looking at Hebrew. Am I right in thinking the alphabet consists of only consonants, and vowels are written as dots and stuff below the consonant they procede. But these vowel symbols are only written for learners, i.e like stress marks in Russian or the dots on the Ё. So if you get a Hebrew newspapers, you will need to know the words already to be able to know what vowels it has and therefore how to say it?
Are the vowels in Hebrew proper vowels. Someone told me they are very short.

Lastly, Как по-русски Hebrew.