Quote Originally Posted by Coup
I was also told I don't need to know the alphabet - is this true?
NO.

Who told you that?
Well, it's not something new, and this position is not rare, unfortunately. We Russians can understand a word written in Latin, it's true. But, it's ugly and often is difficult. What would you say if I were to write in English like this: йес, ин Енглисх лике тхис ?
So do you think you don't need to know the Cyrilic alphabet?

You should understand that in Russian it's not like in, say, Serbian which uses both the Cyrilic and the Latin alphabet. Russian language only uses Cyrilic, and if you don't learn and don't use it, you simply don't respect the language. I also don't think that such learning could be quite successful.

And, by the way, you would hardly get corrections if you write in Russian using Latin letters.

P.S. What's in your avatar?