Countries where Russian is an official or dominant language

Almost everything people believe about learning Russian is aimed at the wrong target.

The alphabet gets the attention. It is a week's work, and the least of your problems. Meanwhile the two things that genuinely take years go unmentioned until a learner is deep enough to be surprised by them.

The alphabet is a week

Thirty-three letters. Several you already know from Greek or from maths. A handful are false friends worth learning early, because they look like Latin letters and are not: the one shaped like a Latin R is pronounced en, the one shaped like a B is pronounced ve, and the one shaped like a P is pronounced er.

Read it aloud badly for a week and it becomes automatic. It is genuinely one of the best returns on effort in the language, which is why it is lesson two of this course rather than a wall to get over first.

What the cases are for

English marks a noun's job three ways: by position, by articles, and by little words like to, of and with. Russian does all of it with an ending on the noun.

That is why Russian has no articles at all and why its word order is free for emphasis. It is not doing more work than English; it is spending the same budget differently. Six sets of endings sounds punishing and is not, because they overlap heavily and a few patterns cover most of what you meet.

Cases are finite. They yield to drilling. They become automatic within months.

What actually takes years

Verb aspect. Almost every Russian verb exists as a pair: one presenting the action as a process, the other as a completed whole. English splits some of this across its tenses and leaves the rest to context, so there is no rule to translate and no instinct to transfer. You are forced to commit, in every sentence, to information English lets you leave out.

If you are budgeting worry, spend it here and not on the alphabet.

What this course is

The Cyrillic alphabet, a hundred words, and three grammar guides: the six cases, verb aspect, and conjugation. Russian needs far more than a hundred words to be useful, and this course is honest that it is a way in rather than a way through.

Frequently asked

Frequently asked

Is Russian hard to learn?

Genuinely difficult for English speakers, and not where beginners expect. The Foreign Service Institute puts it at roughly twice the hours Spanish takes. The alphabet is a week's work. The difficulty is that every noun, adjective and pronoun changes its ending across six cases, and that verbs come in pairs whose difference has no English equivalent.

How long does it take to learn the Russian alphabet?

Most learners read Cyrillic slowly within a few days and fluently within a few weeks. Several letters are already familiar from Greek or Latin, a handful are false friends worth learning early, and the rest are new shapes for sounds English already has. It is one of the better returns on effort in the whole language.

Do I need a Russian keyboard?

Not on this site. Every typed answer accepts Latin transliteration as well as Cyrillic, so spasibo and the Cyrillic spelling are both marked correct. Almost nobody has a Russian layout installed, and demanding one would test your keyboard rather than your Russian.

Across the Russian library

Everything on the site for Russian, in the order you would learn it.

Start here

Core vocabulary

Grammar