A few forum members have asked that I repost my advice on learning Russian that I'd posted on RVF, so here’s a version of it that I updated to be a little more relevant in 2023:
In the broadest sense, the most important thing I did was commit to at least two hours of studying or practicing Russian every day, no exceptions, no matter how much I didn’t feel like it on any given day. I’d often do as much as four hours or even more of studying and conversation practice. I mixed this up between the following:
1) Vocabulary
2) Reading aloud for pronunciation
3) Directly studying grammar
4) Reading for comprehension
5) Talking to native speakers (and listening to mistakes they make when speaking English)
Before getting into details on these, let me say that three months before arriving in the FSU, I worked through all three levels of the Pimsleur Russian program. Pimsleur is an amazing way to get started in Russian and if you follow the program it works. The main thing is not to skip a day ever, for any reason. I was able to communicate with native speakers in Russian on a very basic level on my first day in the FSU.
So, high level, my advice would be:
1)
Start with Pimsleur. Spend three months doing all three levels of Pimsleur Russian without skipping a day for any reason.
2)
Study for at least two hours a day, no skipping days. After you’ve finished Pimsleur and acquired basic conversational skills, study or practice Russian for two to four hours a day until you’re highly conversational. After about a year, I could carry on a conversation fairly easily with educated native speakers speaking grammatically correct Russian who wanted me to understand them (i.e. little to no slang). The time frame will obviously vary for different people.
Now let me briefly break down each of the five points I mentioned above:
1) Vocabulary
Obviously, make your own flash cards for important words you struggle to remember. However, be sure to also pick up:
Memorize your flash cards and everything in the book. To be honest, I consider “Roots of the Russian Language” to have been my secret weapon in cracking Russian. I found vocabulary the hardest thing in learning the language. For example, the word for independence in Spanish is “independencia” but in Russian it’s “nezavisimost.” ROTRL teaches you the simple roots used to make up long, complex Russian words and you memorize groups of words based on one root. For example “vod” is the root that means water, so you learn “vodavorot” (waterfall) and “navodneniya” (flood) and “vodapad” (water fall) all together. After a while the way Russian words are formed just starts to make sense and you can often guess at the meaning of long words you haven’t seen before. This book is essential. I can’t recommend it enough.
2) Reading aloud for pronunciation
This helps with any language, but it’s tough in Russian because Russian words have accents and if you accent the wrong syllable native speakers will often be unable to understand you AND the accents are never written, except in textbooks for foreigners. To whit, this book is great because it contains Russian stories in the original Russian with accents on the words, as well as an English translation on the facing page:
Russian Stories: A Dual-Language Book (English and Russian Edition)
After a while (a long while) you start to get a general feel for how the accents work and you don’t need to see them written out most of the time to pronounce the word correctly.
Note that Russian pronunciation is hard for native English speakers. In my first year in the FSU I often knew how to say something correctly, I just couldn’t pronounce it so that native speakers could understand me. It can be very frustrating and it’s going to take a lot of time to get it down. I remember that I could never really pronounce the word for “furniture” correctly or hear the difference when people corrected me.
3) Directly studying grammar
Grammar is hard in Russian. I had an advantage because I’d already studied German and Latin, languages that share some grammatical features with Russian that don’t exist in English or most Romance languages. You can try to figure the grammar out with a text book on your own, but if you don’t have experience with another Slavic language or an ancient Indo-European language like Latin, I’d recommend getting a professional tutor. I used to use this site for conversation practice, but you should be able to find a tutor who speaks good English and can help you figure out the grammar here too:
https://preply.com/
The prices have gone up a bit since when I signed up several years ago, but it looks like there are still plenty of tutors available who charge less than $10 an hour.
4) Reading for comprehension
I don’t have a lot of specific advice here. Maybe start with illustrated children’s stories or comics first. Reading Russian is hard when you’re a beginner. If there’s a Russian classic you’ve read in English you might try tackling it in Russian once you’ve made it up to the intermediate level. I read Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in translation as a teenager and it made quite an impression on me, so I was able to read it in Russian with about a year or so of studying the language. My memories of the plot and characters helped me to follow along (although it still took something like a year for me to finish it).
5) Talking to native speakers
Always the most important thing in learning a language. You can have the grammar rules down pat, but if you’re too shy to step out of your comfort zone and actually talk to native speakers in their language, you won’t become conversational. If you happened to be over in the former USSR a local girlfriend who doesn’t speak English is pretty much the greatest way to learn, but in current year given the situation in that part of the world, this probably wouldn’t be easy to pull off. My experience in the FSU was almost entirely in Russia and Ukraine over twenty years ago, so there might be other countries where it would still be realistic to live there and there are still enough native Russian speakers to immerse yourself in the language. Maybe other members who know of such places could comment on that.
Assuming you can’t live in an environment with mostly native Russian speakers right now, you could try using Preply (
https://preply.com/) for conversation practice, but since it’s gotten a little more expensive in the last few years, you might want to look for some kind of “language exchange” online. At least I’ve heard that such things exist, where you practice conversation with a native speaker of the language you want to learn, then help him or her out with English. Maybe someone who’s used one could comment about it below.
There are also conversation clubs for foreign languages available sometimes. I’ve used them in my city in the US for practicing both Russian and Spanish. You get a good mix of native speakers and locals who want to learn the language at these.
Another thing, and this applies to any language, if you do know native speakers who speak English, listen to mistakes they make or quirky things they say that don’t sound just right. That will often give you clues as to how to say things more naturally in Russian. For example, I once assigned an essay on the topic of fast food to my students in the school where I taught. I noticed that almost all of them wrote that fast food is not “useful.” This is how I learned that the common way to say that food is healthy in Russian is to use the Russian word for “useful” (polyezny).
Basically, as with most things of value in life, it’s just going to take a lot of time and hard work and there’s no way around that. Hopefully what I’ve written will give some of you ideas on how to go about it. Remember, commit to at least two hours a day if you’re serious about learning this language. It’s a lot, but it will probably be one of your proudest accomplishments if you manage to learn it. I know it is for me.
Any questions, just ask.
