You can think of he 'Я' character as either a W-colored 'R' or a Rhotic W. It combines the 'er' vowel with the 'W' effect. Both sounds occur concurrently!
With the normal 'W' sound, we voice a vowel that is close to 'oo' as in 'loop', 'boot', etc. as part of the 'W' consonant. With the Rhotic 'W', we voice the 'er' vowel as part of the 'W' sound. It appears that our ancesters understood this and that explains why many words begin with a 'wr' digraph, such as 'wrap', 'wrath', 'wring', 'write' etc. At 7M, we don't believe in inefficient, time consuming digraphs, so the 'wr' is replaced with a single 'Я'* (see footnote).
This sound is found in words like:
rat
wrong
write
rubber
rich
It was necessary to add the 'Я' character to the 7M alphabet in order to cope with words like 'Rural' and 'error' where a continuous 'er' sound is modulated by the 'W' effect to alter the sound into something that resembles a consonant. Consider 'braided' vs 'berated'. The only real difference is that the 'er' sound is elongated in 'berated' to make it a 3 syllable word but how do you spell this? I was using a double 'rr' as a makeshift solution, but this failed to meet every challenge. So the word 'rural' is commonly pronounced with a 'W'-colored 'R' followed by a standard 'er'(IPA 'ɹ') and followed by another 'W'-colored 'R' then concluding with a Dark L vowel. You should feel your lips pursing to make the 'W'-colored 'R's at the first and third letter positions. This is the most inscrutable and marginal of all English consonants, in my opinion.
[FOOT NOTE: The 'Я' character is NOT the character I hoped to use. My character of choice must be custom fabricated and added to the Unicode superset. The entire 7M character set will need to be added to unicode in the future, once all the new character designs are finalized.]