Cyrillic alphabet, part 3: the vowels

Once again, the modern Russian Cyrillic alphabet looks like so:
А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я

We covered the consotants. The vowels, now, are the things that look like vowels, plus the things that look backwards. That means these letters:
А Е Ё И Й О У Ы Э Ю Я
A's and E's and I's and backwards N's and R's.

The vowel sounds are not quite as intuitive to the English speaker as consonants are.  One thing that helps is to note that the vowels are paired into "soft" and "hard" forms of the same sound.

As an example, most English speakers are familiar with the Russian word for "no," which is usually transliterated as "nyet."  The "ye" is a soft vowel; the corresponding hard vowel is a plain "e" as in the English word "net."

The hard and soft pairs of vowels are:

1. А (pronounced "ah" as the a in "father") and Я (pronounced "ya" as in "yard")
2. Э (pronounced "eh" as the e in "bet") and Е (pronounced "ye" as in "yes")
3. У (pronounced "oo" as in "boot") and Ю (pronounced "you" as the u in "universe" or the English word in "you")
4. О (pronounced "oh" as the o in "phone") and Ё  (pronounced "yo" as in "yoghurt")
5. Ы (pronounced "ih" as the i in "sit") and И (pronounced "ee" as the i in "marine")

The first four pairs are phonetically linked, where the soft vowel sounds similar to the hard vowel, but with a "y" added at the beginning.  The fifth pair is a little more complex, but with obviously related sounds.

That leaves one last letter: Й.  This letter is sometimes considered a consonant and sometimes a vowel, much like the English Y (remember A-E-I-O-U-and-sometimes-Y?)  In fact, Й serves something of the same function as the English Y, pairing with other vowels.  For example, the Cyrillic letter pair ОЙ is pronounced "oy" as in "boy."

That's a short introduction to Cyrillic.  I've skipped over the more complicated rules and exceptions, but the above covers most simple words.