so-you-want-to-learn-russian

This post will likely be an indefinite work-in-progress, and many things will be subject to change. It's also way too long, and I’ve taken on an irritating pedagogic tone that I tried my best to excise, but it still lingers, everywhere… I hope you can bear with it. The post is intended to be:
  1. a sort of fanmail of the Russian language,
  2. a documentation of my language-learning methodology,
  3. an aggregation of helpful resources for Russian learners.

Table of Contents

  1. You should be reading a lot.
  2. About Russian grammar
  3. Some helpful resources
  4. Parting thoughts

Related blog(s) of people who have attained a high level of Russian via immersion-based methods, since for Russian they are few and far between:

This post is inspired by suboptimalism’s learning japanese: the suboptimalist perspective, which I highly recommend you go and read, even if you’re not learning Japanese; if he had written about learning Russian then I would’ve never thought to write this post.

So, I hope I am correct in assuming you clicked on this because you want to learn Russian.

To your average English-speaker, to your average American, what is the Russian language? Perceptions range over all sorts of cultural stereotypes and vignettes: the mafia, the Cold War, the current invasion of Ukraine, babushkas and gopniks and cossacks, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Space Race, oligarchs and monarchs and despots, pumpjacks drilling for oil in the Siberian hinterland, the umbilical land-bridge that once girded the Bering Strait, conveying the first Americans ever to live in their New World.

Despite all this, and more, the online Russian-learner community still pales in presence to that of Japanese. It does not have anything close to the same contemporary pop-cultural presence, nor the infrastructure of pinpoint-accurate dubs and subs, nor the specialised sentence-mining software with tried-and-true pipelines, not even the general appeal of animanga.

Even in the present-day, many resources for learning Russian have direct predecessors in material written by and for CIA employees, with textbook sentences as dry as “I’m scared of terrorists” and “George Bush is the president of the USA”. It’s probably not as dire as learning, say, Pashto, but there’s something anachronistic and anemic about it all…

Most Russian learners get into it due to their family being Russian-speakers, for diplomatic reasons, because they “want to read Russian literature in the original”, for history-nerd reasons, or because they’re enthusiastic about other parts of Russian culture (which could be a good or very bad thing, depending on the part). None of these are mutually exclusive, by the way.

Personally, I started learning Russian because one of my best friends is Kazakh and relatedly, I have a long-standing obsession with Central Asia and Siberia. When I was ten years old a Mongolian classmate wrote my name in block Cyrillic for me, and at that moment it all clicked into place (just kidding). But seriously, maybe I should be learning Kazakh, and thus join the straggling ranks of the world’s marginal Ural-Altaicists…

But the picture I’ve painted so far seems grim. What Russian does have going for it is that it’s the second-most used language on the internet; outside of great works of literature and film, many technical texts have been written in Russian, and once upon a time Russia was very much an artistic and cultural (and OK, STEM) powerhouse. In some respects they still are. It’s still spoken as a major language in a handful of East European countries, the post-Soviet nations of Central Asia, and in a smattering of enclaves in the Americas and the Middle East. Almost everywhere you go, you can hear Russian—a by-product of their historical status as world superpower.

Some people think it sounds beautiful, or even “sexy”. Yeah, maybe if you’re used to the flaccid and rhotic sursurration of English, anything else would sound more interesting, even the comic gutturals of Dutch.

I mean, in some ways, English barely exists. Its vestigial case system, which is only found in pronouns and the possessive form of apostrophe ’s’es (yes, that’s English’s genitive case!), feels like nothing at all when compared to that of German (whose own case system has eroded over time), or even that of Swedish, whose case system is even more edgeless than German’s. Yet, Swedish still employs in modern speech its equivalents of “thither”, “hither”, and “whither” (in Russian, туда, сюда, and куда respectively), while in English these have all collapsed back into “there”, “here”, “where”. A few people doggedly stick to using “whom” properly, though most view it as the archaicism that it is, and mock it with terminally-online exclamations of “whomst’d’ve’s”. We all know it: English has no self-respect. It’s too big and rareified to even pretend to: English has no Académie Française, no Real Academia Española.

So, sometimes the appeal of learning Russian is the moments where you can spy a glimmer of raw history through the unassuming surface. In many instances, there is a clear logic. The word for plant, растение, is related to the verb “to grow”, расти. A plant is then literally “something that grows”. The word for “inspiration”, вдохновение, is a calque of the Ancient Greek ἔμπνοια, which begat the Latin inspiro, which of course begat the English “inspiration”. Then as expected, the morpheme в- means “in”, -дох- is a stem related to “breath”, and we have the -ение which signifies a noun. Inspiration is “something that is like a breath inside of you”.

But there are plenty of words in the Russian lexicon which can’t be broken down and digested. These words come in a variety of different flavors—arising from Old Church Slavonic, or the Turkic peoples (the Tuvans, the Sakhas…), or the Mongols, or those of the Caucasus (the Avars, the Nakhs…)—words spoken by the highlanders of the 14th century, Orthodox missionaries of the 9th, reindeer-herding tribesmen of the 17th.

There might be excitement in drawing lines to the familiar, but there is just as much in finding the totally unfamiliar. I apologise if I’m exotifying what is a completely reasonable history, but it’s mind-boggling to consider the vastness of it all, in space and in time and in the millions of lives of those speakers on horseback, beneath a pale, bare, and impossibly remote sky.

The Turkic words, in particular, leap out at you like a sore thumb. You look at them and think, “there’s no way this is Slavic or Latin or Ancient Greek”. Сундук (box), деньги (money, which originates from Mongolic teng which itself originates from Chinese 等), карандаш (pencil), and many more. Sometimes they’ll even sound Korean. I see why the Ural-Altaic theory was so tempting to believe in.

One word I love from Russian, with purely Slavic origins, is the word край, which usually means “edge”, but also is a specific word meaning “territory”, in the sense of an official, administrative division of land. Every territory—even one at the heart of the country—is somehow also an edge, everything on the horizon approaching a limit just out of view. That’s how vast the landmass we call Russia really is. What’s more, ancient Slavonic words like край or река (meaning “river”) decline in certain ways that let you know that you are using words from a thousand-plus years ago, acting in different grammatical ways from their “younger” compatriots.

If you’ve decided to learn Russian, you’ve voluntarily taken the first step onto road less traveled. But this is only the beginning. Like learning any other language, it requires you to channel “deep autistic energies” (thank you suboptimalism for the apt words), i.e. a willingness to bash your head against the wall in the face of seemingly minimal and at times actually minimal progress.

I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but one of the perennial and unhelpful types of post which plagues r/Russian (maybe I shouldn’t be ragging on them so much, it is Reddit after all) is the tendency for learners to seek easy gratification by posting a photo of their Russian cursive handwriting.

(There is a sort of internet mythos surrounding Russian cursive due to the meme that makes the rounds of someone’s handwritten лишишь or шиншилла, which looks like a bunch of conjoined cursive u’s. It’s like if you were to write “minimum” in English cursive.)

Almost invariably, there will be some well-meaning native speaker who comments, “your handwriting looks better than mine, and I’m a native speaker!” Yeah, it looks better for the same reason a precocious five-year-old’s handwriting will look better than the handwriting of some random twenty-something-year-old you drag off the street. Not exactly a compliment.

I can’t tell what’s worse, the cursive handwriting posts or the posts that ask, “can I just not learn cursive and write everything in block letters?” Like, I don’t know man, not wanting to know how to handwrite the language you supposedly want to learn to a significant level is a weird hill to die on, and doesn’t portend well for you. If I were a mod on r/Russian, I would simply perma-ban anyone who makes a post with some variant of “handwriting” in the title. Anyways…

You should be reading a lot.

I’ll repeat myself: you should be reading a lot.

The information density of pure text is hard—just about impossible—to find anywhere else, so you’ll get the most bang for your buck just by reading things: Wikipedia articles, news, game dialogue, the nutritional label on a bottle of kvass… and so on.

However, reading is also the activity with the highest barrier of entrance: you’ll probably need to know a couple thousand words to read even a young-adult novel without having to look a word up every other sentence. Even a children’s storybook is nothing to scoff at. (Sometimes, the archaic vocabulary/constructs used in them makes them even more difficult to parse.) The good news is that once you start reading, every proceeding book, or article, or comic will become much easier of an experience, sort of following a snowball effect. Getting started will be painful, however. See the deep autistic energy that I cited a few paragraphs ago; this is where a lot of it comes into play.

Another important note: you have to get used to not understanding 50%, maybe even 75% or higher of what you’re reading, and then at some point you just have to push on despite the ignorance clouding your comprehension.

Of course, probably don’t read Crime and Punishment in the original if you’re having trouble keeping up with the subtitles on a kid’s TV show. But I’ve found that reading a novel where I understood on average ~60%-70% of what was going on to be a relatively OK experience. I think some people are just going to have a naturally higher tolerance of uncertainty than others, but you can certainly train yourself to raise it just by reading more. This discomfort is a necessary stage.

One of the main downsides to reading a lot is that Russian has somewhat unpredictable stresses on words, much like English does. Unlike Polish, which reliably has the stress on the penultimate syllable, or Korean, which doesn’t have stress at all, it’s very possible to learn an incorrect pronunciation of a word—I’ve done this many times. To make things slightly more confusing, many texts won’t delineate between two similar-looking, but very different-sounding letters—“е” and “ё”, which sound like “ye” and “yo” respectively—which can dramatically change the pronunciation and stress of the word. After a while it becomes slightly easier to predict when it is an е versus when it is a ё, but it can still set you up for an unpleasant surprise.

If you get the stress wrong, Russians could probably still understand you with some difficulty, but try saying a sentence in English such that the stress on every word falls on the wrong syllable where possible. It’s quite awkward at best, and incomprehensible at worst.

About Russian grammar

Just like how many immersion-fiend Japanese learners will recommend that you go through a basic Japanese grammar crash-course (e.g. Tae Kim’s) before starting immersion in the language, you can’t (or, really, shouldn’t) forego explicitly learning grammar for Russian. If you’re learning Russian you know that it has a lot of peculiarities, like the complex (compared to English) case system, verbs of motion, verbal aspect, and participles. Almost every word is declined in some way, shape or form, aside from the prepositions, which in turn have their own idiosyncrasies that are quite different from English prepositions.

It’ll be a lot less painful for you if you go into immersion knowing at least the mechanics of the case system and verbal aspect beforehand. Like many other things in life it sort of follows a Pareto law in which knowing about 20% of the thing allows you to glean the remaining 80% much more easily.

You don’t need to know every conjugation and declension, just know that these grammatical constructs are a thing, and what they signify. You can absorb the details and the exceptions on the go.

For learning these types of things, I really like Dr. Mark Pettus’s Russian Through Propaganda textbook series, which is pretty much unmatched in terms of quality and contains many interesting nuggets about Russian history and culture.

There is also a free online textbook called Mezhdu Nami, which is quite comprehensive and could take you to a level with which you can start immersing with “real” content.

The main sort of “modules” that comprise Russian grammar (from a self-learner’s limited point of view) seem to be (roughly in this order):

Undoubtedly, there are a lot of other details I’m skimming over (like the genitive of absence, or superlatives), but these are the most general ones that immediately come to mind, and probably your average broad-strokes look at a two-year college Russian language course.

If you know all these things exist (maybe aside from verb transitivity, which you can divine on-the-go), and vaguely how they work, you’re in a pretty good place and you can focus on exclusively building vocabulary, which ultimately reinforces the intuition behind these concepts without you having to get into the nuts and bolts of them.

There’s a sort of phenomenon, not unique to Russian, where you’ll get to a point where you can understand a fancily-worded but syntactically simple sentence, e.g., “The organization established the first geothermal plant at the edge of the city.” “Учреждение основанил первый геотермальной завод на краю города.” However, it’ll be much harder to understand a phrase that is composed of simple words yet nevertheless communicates something more abstract, like: “He was back and stronger than ever.” “Он вернулся и сильнее, чем когда бы то ни было”. Especially the second part of that sentence.

“Than ever” is a peculiar construction in both languages. I mean, what is “ever” in English? Similarly, “когда бы то ни было” makes no sense when literally translated. You can see that all the words are quite short, and all of them are quite simple, being words that you’d probably learn in your first month of Russian classes. But in their aggregate, in this particular order, it’s gibberish to me—translated literally, the gloss looks like “when would neither was”, but it plays the same role as the amorphous “ever” in the English sentence. In cases like these, you just have to learn the entire Russian phrase as a morphological chunk, without getting too caught up on what each individual word is doing.

A common mistake that many learners (including me) tend to make is proscribing the grammatical structures of their native language onto their target language. Maybe since Russian doesn’t look as foreign as languages like Japanese or Arabic, and the word order is somewhat similar some of the time (if you squint your eyes really hard), it’s easier for speakers of Germanic or Romance languages to get caught up on certain Russian-isms. Why, in Russian, do we say в пятницу (“in” Friday) and not на пятницу (“on” Friday)? And why is it the accusative case (пятницу) instead of the expected prepositional case (пятнице)? You could come up with hundreds, if not thousands of these arbitrary questions. They have no real answer.

Some helpful resources

For those who are curious about what tools have been helpful in learning this language, here is a list of some software that I’ve used, and some that I still use.

Although, success in language learning is not really a function of what kind of app you have installed on your device, but I’m sure (at least, I hope!) you’re well aware of that at this point. I love provocative-sounding simplifications, so I'll say that language learning is mainly a function of how much you read. Now there might be some tools which make reading a little less painful.

LingQ (free trial)

Steve Kaufmann’s (YouTuber known for speaking many languages) brainchild. He shills it in every video, and perhaps he deserves to; he uses it himself. You can’t really do much with the free version. There’s nothing that I can do in the paid version that I can’t already do now with my own tools. I don’t recommend against paying for LingQ, but I don’t really see much point in it, especially since free software exists that does the same things as LingQ. However, if you think you’re going to consistently use it, there’s nothing wrong with paying for a subscription. Many people have found it beneficial.

Language Reactor (free trial)

Only available on Chromium-based browsers. Basically helps you to sentence-mine and create flashcards easily via subtitles on YouTube and Netflix. There is a paid version which you need to have to access all of the features. I can see this being very helpful for someone with a different workflow and preferences than me. As far as I know there is no alternative free software (for Russian, at least).

Anki (free)

I know it’s somewhat of a meme, but Anki really works for me in helping to learn vocabulary. I see it as working a compromise—it’s not practical for me to be immersed in Russian literally all day, so the natural (and perhaps more superior quality) spaced repetition that comes from constant ambient exposure doesn’t really happen. With Anki, though, I can try my best to simulate this exposure.

If you for some reason don’t want to use Anki, there are several other spaced-repetition alternatives like Mnemosyne and SuperMemo. Or, you can always use physical flashcards and schedule them manually.

Kiwix (free)

Kiwix enables you to have an offline search engine. Download Wiktionary files (for both the English and Russian versions) and you’ve got yourself a dictionary stored locally on your device. I think I’ve also downloaded parts of Russian Wikipedia as well, just for reading’s sake.

Dictionaries/Translators (all free)

By far, I’ve used the English language Wiktionary the most, but I’m currently in the process of trying to transition into using dictionaries written in Russian.

In this case, I either use the Russian language Wiktionary, Викисловарь, or the ever-helpful gramota.ru, which is a sort of meta-dictionary you can use to search multiple dictionaries at once. On gramota, I like to search the Большой толковый русский словарь.

N.B.: There does exist a sort of “dictionary vocabulary” that is useful to know before you dive into monolingual dictionaries. Words like “noun”, “adjective”, “tense” and the names of the different cases should be helpful to learn explicitly, as they don’t often show up outside of an academic or dictionary context.

Honestly, Reverso’s context feature is unparalleled in its usefulness. It gives you plenty of sentences to mine from, and helps fine-tune your intuition of how a word can be used. It also identifies more colloquial/slang-y usages of words that official dictionaries might miss out on. I’m sure websites like glosbe and DeepL are quite similar.

Occasionally, I will know every word in the sentence, but still have no idea of what the sentence actually means. In these desperate times, I like to use the Yandex Translator as a last resort.

If that doesn’t work, then… it’s useful to know a Russian-speaker for those dire situations.

I haven’t personally used it much, though I have them downloaded, but I hear that GoldenDict and LWT are very useful (and open-source) software for sentence mining and looking up definitions.

Be warned, though: as deep as the goodie bag of language-learning software is (yes, even the open-source subset), the best methodology is the one you’ll stick to using over a long period of time.

For me, this is usually the method requiring a minimal amount of activation energy; i.e., the simplest, most tried-and-true methods possible. In my case it looks like Anki, and reading books or other pieces of writing online. Lingq and the rest of the above are helpful, but by no means are they the end-all-be-all. I mention them mainly because I know that people have found success with them (here we must note, at least for one moment, the glaring absence of Duolingo) and because preferences/habits differ wildly from person to person.

Movies, TV shows (streaming)

I haven’t watched many TV shows. Literally the only one I’ve ever watched consistently is Smeshariki (Смешарики), an animated kids show whose episodes are available on YouTube (no subtitles, sadly, I have to deal with the inaccuracy of the auto-generated ones). Apparently it’s kind of like Russian Bluey: ostensibly a kids show that keeps taking its hat off to any adults that might be watching.

You probably already know this if you’re learning Russian, but Mosfilm has an official channel on Youtube and they upload their full-length movies on there. Only a few of them, however, have Russian subtitles. I’ve found it pretty difficult to get Russian subtitles in general. For whatever reason, there are little to no closed captions on anything. Also, it’s funny—on some websites, there will be Ukrainian or Polish subtitles but not Russian ones, despite the latter being spoken by way more people. Maybe it’s some petty cultural sanction—I have no clue.

I also enjoyed watching the Russian dubs of Studio Ghibli movies. Many things can be pirated much more easily in Russian than in English due to the virtual nonexistence of copyright law in Russia. This is one of the many wonders you encounter when learning Russian.

YouTubers

These are the channels whose videos I’ve enjoyed at least once. I don’t watch that much YouTube, though. Maybe less than an hour’s worth per week. I really should be listening more…

For Russian learners

There are a lot more of these immersion type Russian channels for beginners/intermediates, such as Russian with Dasha and In Russian From Afar, but I personally do not watch these channels. I’m sure they’re pretty much all the same, more or less.

For Russian natives

In no particular order:

Books

In general it’s quite easy to find free ebooks by appending “читать онлайн бесплатно” to the book title as a search query. Once again, the lack of copyright regulation in Russia is good news for us learners.

I have Olly Richards’ Learn Russian Through Short Stories for intermediate learners, and though I like the concept, I don’t like the book itself as much. The stories aren’t very interesting, the vocabulary feels arbitrary and at times even clunky. I don’t draw a hard line at material that isn’t “by natives for natives”, but Richards’ book just doesn’t appeal to me.

Manga/comics

These are much less information-dense than novels/short stories, so it’s quite good for people who are just starting out reading. In many ways easier than reading children’s stories. Most are basically just the dialogue, and the visuals help as context clues. Simple, slice-of-life and relatively narrative-less manga like Yotsuba&! are quite nice and easy to start out with. Meanwhile, fantasy manga will come with their own host of vocabulary to learn, e.g. words related to combat, magic, etc, so be warned.

I’d imagine you could graduate from manga to reading light novels, which are easier to read than regular novels. I haven’t personally read any light novels but I know a Russian learner (Attenius) has (I’ve linked his blog above), and he’s found them very helpful.

Music?

It’s good to be in contact with the language beyond just reading and mining sentences—for example, to know more about the culture, listening to their music is a good start. As a beginner, it helped me to learn a lot of words and got me accustomed to some grammatical structures, some more helpful than others. Just be aware that the sentences found in lyrics can seem strange to directly use in everyday speech.

Bands like the ever-popular Kino tend to have sparse, repetitive lyrics, (most of the Russian “doomer rock” that’s been trendy nowadays follows in the same vein) while others are more dense. Rap is probably going to be the most dense.

However, I wouldn’t really count time spent listening to music in the language as time spent “studying” the language. Mainly because it tends to be so informationally sparse (unless it’s rap), you’re much better off listening to a podcast or video. Or even better, reading.

Other

These are mainly reading materials, as that’s my preferred way of interacting with Russian. I tend to haunt these websites:

There’s also VK (ВКонтакте) and LiveJournal (i.e., Живой Журнал. Did you know it is Russian-owned?).

Sometimes I will paste in a few paragraphs from an article/book I’m reading, and practice typing it out. It might sound insane, but it’s weirdly therapeutic.

Telegram channels are similar to personal blogs. Many online creators and public figures in general have one of them, though normal people can keep their friends updated with these personal channels as well.

Turning my phone’s language to Russian has been mildly helpful. I know that this too is sort of a meme, but it really cements some vocabulary into your head—words like the days of the week and months, alarms, notifications, webpage, cancel and edit, etc.

I’d say around the B1 level is where you’d get the most mileage out of changing your phone or computer’s language to your target language, especially with electronic-device-related vocabulary. Doing it too early unfortunately results in you depending too much on muscle memory rather than actually reading and understanding the labels and descriptions.

Parting thoughts

Russian has a fairly long list of pros that come with it, and its main cons are those inherent to learning any foreign language: it’s a hell of a lot of work for an ever-diminishing benefit—namely the ability to understand someone from another country, another era.

As suboptimalist also mentioned, it’s honestly really difficult to justify learning any language in the age of real-time translation. Maybe in the not-so-far future, self-directed language learning will become something like film criticism: an interesting cultural oddity of the late twentieth to twenty first century rendered obsolete in the mainstream, relegated to hobbydom for the most neurotic and pigheaded of us. But, I’d hazard a guess that if you’re reading this and/or have a personal website, it is quite likely you identify with that category.

All of the Russians/Russian-speaking people I’ve met and spoken basic Russian to are always pleasantly surprised and curious. I said “здравствуйте” (the formal word to greet someone, whose seemingly disgusting consonant clusters also act as a filter to any newcomers to the language—it’s actually not that bad to say, since most of it gets elided!) to my Russian Uber driver once and she got so excited I was worried we were going to crash.

I guess it’s because Russian and English are different enough so that it’s common knowledge to either party that the other must have put in a lot of effort in knowing even small amounts of the respective foreign language. Also, the fact that far more Russian speakers are learning English, than the other way around.

With the invasion of Ukraine looming in the backdrop, who would want to learn the language of the global black sheep anyways? This has got to be one of the strangest questions I’ve seen being asked, especially seeing that one of the most popular languages to learn is Japanese—and I don’t think Japan is due to make a comeback on the economic world stage any time soon. It’s not as if learning Ukrainian makes you a morally better person, either, and yet that is what’s being implied. (If you think this is the case, I'm sorry. At least you have the rest of your life to change your mind.)

Once you’ve gone far enough into learning Russian, it’s likely that another Slavic language will catch your eye… and that’s when you know that it’s far too late to turn back.

I have to mention, it’s really fascinating to be able to understand all of this video (whose host only speaks in Interslavic, a constructed language based on the common ground between all modern day Slavic languages) literally only because of your half-assed knowledge of Russian. I can’t really think of an English analogue to it—maybe the closest thing would be Esperanto to Romance language speakers. Almost two years of learning Russian on-and-off, and all I got was the ability to understand a fake language. That's a common sort of trade-off you'll get with language learning, and I'll still keep at it, because I'm insane.