How this course works
Russian is spoken by around 250 million people and is the largest native language in Europe. It is official in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and widely used across Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Two pieces of good news
The alphabet takes about a week. Cyrillic has 33 letters, and roughly a third are already familiar from the Latin alphabet. It looks far harder than it is, and it is the first thing this course removes as an obstacle.
Spelling is close to phonetic. Once you know the letters and two vowel rules, you can read any Russian word aloud.
And one honest warning
Russian nouns change their endings according to their role in the sentence — six cases, each with several patterns. This is the real work of learning Russian, and it takes years to master rather than weeks. This course teaches the alphabet properly, the three cases a beginner genuinely needs, and enough vocabulary and structure to hold a first conversation.
How the course is arranged
| MODULE | WHAT IT COVERS |
|---|---|
| The alphabet | All 33 letters, and the pronunciation rules |
| First grammar | Gender, the case system, verbs, questions |
| First conversations | Greetings, introductions, politeness |
| Everyday Russian | Numbers, family, food, travel |
| Past tense and practice | Talking about yesterday, reading, next steps |
How to study
Learn the alphabet completely before anything else. Using transliteration as a crutch permanently slows you down.
Write by hand. Russian handwriting differs noticeably from print, but printing letters by hand is still the fastest way to fix them in memory.
Say everything aloud, and pay attention to which syllable is stressed — Russian stress moves, and it changes how the vowels sound.
Thirty to forty minutes per lesson.