Russian · Curriculum
The Russian curriculum, start to finish.
1 chapters, 24 lessons. A new band of the 100 most common words every hundred ranks, the grammar that turns those words into sentences woven in, and a graded reader closing each chapter that you can read using only what you have learned so far.
- 1
- Chapters
- 24
- Lessons
- 4
- Grammar primers
- 1
- Story milestones
A frequency-first start on Russian: the Cyrillic alphabet in an afternoon, the first 100 words, and the six cases that do the work English does with word order. No Cyrillic keyboard required, anywhere on the site.
Is Russian hard, and how long does it take? Read first.
Is Russian hard to learn?
Russian is genuinely difficult for English speakers, and the difficulty is not where beginners expect. The alphabet is not the problem: thirty-three letters, mostly regular, learnable in an afternoon and solid within a week. The problem is that every noun, adjective and pronoun changes its ending according to six cases, three genders and two numbers, and that verbs come in pairs whose difference has no English equivalent. The Foreign Service Institute puts it at roughly twice the hours Spanish takes.
Cyrillic is a week, not a wall
Several Cyrillic letters are already familiar because they are Greek or Latin in origin, several are false friends worth learning early, and the rest are new shapes for sounds English already has. The false friends are the ones that catch people: the letter that looks like a Latin R is pronounced en, the one that looks like a B is pronounced ve, and the one that looks like a P is pronounced er. Read it aloud badly for a week and it becomes automatic.
You never have to type Cyrillic here
Almost nobody has a Russian keyboard layout installed, so demanding Cyrillic would test your keyboard rather than your Russian. Every typed answer on this site accepts Latin transliteration as well as Cyrillic, so spasibo and the Cyrillic spelling are both marked correct. Where we show a text box we say so on the box.
The six cases, and why aspect is the harder one
Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, prepositional. They mark a noun's job the way German's four do, with more forms and fewer helpful articles, and they are learnable by drilling. Verb aspect is the deeper problem: almost every Russian verb exists as a pair, imperfective for process and repetition, perfective for a completed whole, and choosing between them is a judgement English speakers have no instinct for. Expect cases to take months and aspect to take years.
The chapters
What you can do when you finish
- Read the rank-100 graded reader at the end with no lookups - every content word is from the chapters you just worked through.
- Hold a present-and-past tense conversation: ask questions, talk about routines, narrate what happened yesterday.
- Hedge a request politely, follow everyday speech, and recognise the core grammar that turns vocabulary into sentences.
- Cover the 100 most frequent words - roughly 80% of everyday speech by the frequency curve.
Russian learning: common questions
Frequently asked
How many letters are in the Russian alphabet?
Thirty-three. Twenty-one consonants, ten vowels, and two signs that make no sound of their own but change the consonant before them. Most learners read Cyrillic slowly within a few days and fluently within a few weeks, which makes it one of the better returns on effort in the whole language.
How many cases does Russian have?
Six in ordinary use: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental and prepositional. A vestigial vocative survives in a handful of fixed forms and in colloquial shortenings of names. Six sounds worse than it is, because the endings overlap heavily and a few patterns cover most of what you will meet.
Does Russian have articles?
No. There is no equivalent of the or a, and context does the work instead. This is one of the few places Russian is simpler than English, and it cuts both ways: Russian learners of English find articles among the hardest things to master, because there is nothing in their own language to map them onto.
What is verb aspect in Russian?
Most Russian verbs come as a pair. The imperfective describes an action as a process, a habit or an unfinished thing; the perfective describes it as a single completed whole. English handles some of this with tense and some with context, so there is no rule to translate. It is the part of Russian that takes longest to feel natural and the part worth starting earliest.
Is this a complete Russian course?
No. It is the alphabet, the first 100 words and the grammar that makes them work. Russian needs far more than 100 words to be useful, and this course is honest that it is a way in rather than a way through.