Practise Russian with a native speaker, and give them English conversation practice in return. Roughly 148 million people speak Russian natively, so partners are easy to find; the useful discipline is showing up on time.
Endonym
Русский
Script
Cyrillic alphabet, 33 letters
Spoken in
Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine
First thing to learn
Привет — "Hi (informal)"
US Foreign Service Institute estimate for an English speaker starting from zero
~36 weeks
Distant from English
Russian drops the verb "to be" in the present tense, so "I am a student" is just two words with no verb between them - an English speaker keeps trying to insert one. Add six cases that change the endings of nouns depending on their role, and word order that is free rather than fixed.
Knowing this in advance changes what you do with a partner. Grammar drills on Russianwill not fix a habit your first language gave you — only producing the sentence out loud and being corrected will. That is the specific thing an exchange gives you and an app does not.
A language exchange dies when nobody has anything to talk about. Take these into the call and you will fill the first half without silences.
Say Привет (pree-VYET) as your first line, then ask your partner when they would use it and when they would choose something more formal.
Ask your partner to write your own name in Русский, then explain which sounds in your name do not exist in Russian.
Talk for two minutes about what you imagine daily life is like in Russia. Have your partner correct the parts you got wrong - in Russian first, then again in English.
Talk for two minutes about what you imagine daily life is like in Belarus. Have your partner correct the parts you got wrong - in Russian first, then again in English.
Ask your partner for one sentence that exposes the hard part: Russian drops the verb "to be" in the present tense, so "I am a student" is just two words with no verb between them - an English speaker keeps trying to insert one.
Switch to English and ask your partner to explain their own language's hardest feature to you. This is the half where you pay for the practice, so take it as seriously as your own turn.
You are not here to improve your English — you already have it. Practise Russian with someone who speaks it natively, and pay for it by answering their English questions properly. Fluent English speakers are the scarcest resource on an exchange, which is why you will match quickly.
Russian speakers often need English for technical and academic work and want to practise speaking rather than reading, which is the part classroom teaching covers least.
36 weeks of full-time study to working proficiency, on the US Foreign Service Institute scale - distant from english. Russian drops the verb "to be" in the present tense, so "I am a student" is just two words with no verb between them - an English speaker keeps trying to insert one. Add six cases that change the endings of nouns depending on their role, and word order that is free rather than fixed.
Around 148 million native speakers, concentrated in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan. English has already borrowed tsar, borscht, sputnik from it, so you are not starting from nothing.
Cyrillic alphabet, 33 letters. Because the script is not the one you read in now, reading and speaking improve at different rates and are worth practising separately rather than hoping conversation covers both.
Привет (pree-VYET) - "Hi (informal)". Привет is for friends only. Здравствуйте is the formal form and the safe choice for any first meeting or anyone older - using Привет there is a real misstep rather than a small one.
tsar, borscht, sputnik, vodka, mammoth and taiga all reached English from Russian - 6 words you can use on day one.
Free matching, free voice calls, free video calls. One twenty-minute call is enough to know whether it works for you.
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