first o all, thank you to those of you who responded, i appreciate it. however, perhaps i didn't ask my question correctly because i didn't really understand the responses i got. here i go again...
on the internet, i see words and phrases typed in two different ways. one would be where it looks like a bunch of english vowels with different types of accent marks on top of them., like i see here in this forum. i haven't the slightest idea what those are. and the other is a version where some letters look like english letters, and some don't. i think that's called "cyrillic?" but i'm not sure. i see that on the masterrussian.com web page, among other places. i would appreciate any and all respnses here.
Kimi Burkert
P.S. I feel quite red in the face for not knowing this.