By the way, during my entire formal education, we were never taught the IPA -- our Russian textbooks, for example, used variants of the United Nations / Library of Congress standards for Latinizing Cyrillic. As far as I know, the IPA is mainly taught in "general linguistics" courses, so that students can compare the sounds of different languages, but when you're focusing on ONE foreign language, using the IPA doesn't seem like a great advantage.

I mean, for example, ы will inevitably be a difficult sound for English speakers beginning in Russian, and it doesn't make the slightest difference whether you transliterate it as ɨ (IPA) or y (Library of Congress).