And the mome rath
Scarmiglione outgrabe
...a Cyrillic-alphabetical language learn the letters. Then learn pronunciation and similar mechanics.
For languages with cyrillics, yes, definitely learn the lettering. I find it also helps to try to pick up a little bit of Croatian, since it's written in roman lettering (just with a few accents you have to learn, and some letters pronounced differently). I went through a couple chapters of McGraw-Hill's book on Croatian and it helped me get more comfortable with Ukrainian. Which I still suck at. But I suck less.